Water: nothing goes right
Las Vegas' population growth is impressive: from 262,000 fifty years ago, the city now boasts 2.8 million inhabitants, and is set to pass the 3 million mark in 2025. All this in the middle of the Mojave Desert, the driest desert in North America! This growing population demands ever more water, but aquifers and the artificial Lake Mead are getting thinner as the population grows. Overexploited aquifers are collapsing, creating crevasses, while the level of Lake Mead is falling year on year due to over-pumping and a lack of precipitation upstream. Lake Mead plays a vital role in supplying not only the game's capital, but also California and Arizona.
To deal with the crisis, any means are good enough. Las Vegas has set up a Water Police, , to track down the slightest waste. Leaky equipment, automatic sprinklers used outside authorized hours and other irregularities are subject to fines. After all, it's the locals who consume most of the water, not the hotels and casinos. Subsidies are also available to help homeowners replace their lawns with desert-adapted plants. The Cash for Grass program even offers $3 per square metre of grass removed!
Climate: the die is cast?
Climatic hazards are becoming increasingly uncertain, and Death Valley is not starting out with the best cards in its hand. It holds the world record for the highest temperature: 56.7°C at Furnace Creek in 1913. But global warming is only making the situation worse, so much so that Las Vegas broke its temperature record during the extreme heat wave that swept across the American West in the summer of 2021, with 47.2°C recorded. This record is destined to be broken, however, as Las Vegas is the second fastest-warming American city, according to the NGO Climate Central. Since 1970, the city's average temperature has risen by 3.5°C. The only American city to do worse, Reno, is also located in Nevada. The problem in Las Vegas stems as much from its arid climate as from its large-scale installations. Thousands of air-conditioning systems help to heat the air, just as the black desert roads absorb the heat.
Las Vegas goes green
Nevertheless, Las Vegas is taking numerous measures to combat global warming, so much so that it has been awarded LEED(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Certification. This system aims to evaluate the environmental efficiency of buildings. The city has used LEED as the basis for its 30-year urbanization plan: the 2050 Master Plan. It includes the Las Vegas Tree Initiative, which aims to plant 60,000 trees by 2050, which will cool the atmosphere through shade and evapotranspiration, as well as absorbingCO2 for a depolluting effect.
On a smaller scale, many hotels are redoubling their ecological inventiveness and have themselves obtained LEED certification. Such is the case of the Venetian-Palazzo, which was the first in the city to receive certification, in recognition of its low-energy lighting, eco-friendly cleaning products, certified building materials, water-saving plumbing systems and electric vehicle charging stations. The hotel even operates closed-circuit fountains and feeds its famous canals with non-drinking water filtered on site.
Energy poker
It's no surprise that Las Vegas consumes a lot of energy. It's even the 5th most electricity-hungry American city, despite being only 28th in terms of population! Yet it is also one of the few cities to have achieved the feat of being 100% powered by renewable energies, and has been since 2016. This date corresponds to the launch of the Boulder Solar park, which powers the city's 150 buildings, its public lighting and all its infrastructure.
Jackpot for nature lovers
Far from the colorful neon lights, Las Vegas is the gateway to spectacular natural landscapes. In addition to Nevada's three national parks, it is the gateway to others in California, Utah and Arizona. Death Valley National Park is much more California than Nevada. Covering 13,600 km2, it is the largest national park in the USA, excluding Alaska. Although it may seem counter-intuitive given its climate, the park is of particular botanical interest, being home to at least a thousand plant species, including 23 endemics. Among them, the Mimulus rupicola, with its superb purplish-brown flowers, can only be found between the park's borders.
While the Grand Canyon National Park is well known for its geological interest, its wildlife interest is less well known. And yet, it is a crucial bird sanctuary, with a few individuals of the critically endangered California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus). Once abundant in North American skies, its population was decimated by insecticides and lead pollution, to the point where only 27 remained at the end of the 1980s. These rare survivors were all captured and entrusted to zoos, to prevent the extinction of the species. The plucked-headed birds were reintroduced to the Grand Canyon in 1996, and the state now boasts 60 individuals.
Bryce Canyon National Park is home to another treasure: hoodoos. These geological formations, sometimes called fairy chimneys, are the result of slow erosion of extremely friable sedimentary rock, which formed walls. They eventually perforated at their weakest point, forming arches, which in turn collapsed to create these columns and this lunar landscape.
