Like many involved with tribal fisheries and environmental programs in the Pacific Northwest, Jerimiah Bonifer spends his summer days closely watching water conditions.
For fish preparing to embark on their strenuous journey from the ocean to freshwater spawning grounds in the Columbia River Basin, slight shifts in water temperature or flow can be fatal. So Bonifer, the fisheries program manager at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, keeps his eyes on the data.
This summer, the numbers make him nervous.
Salmon, steelhead and sturgeon need cold water to survive their upriver migration. But the dry winter left a limited snowpack that melted early during spring and summer heat waves, leaving little for late-summer stream flows.
Drought emergencies are in effect in more than half of Oregon’s counties. And in waterways across the Columbia River Basin, temperatures are creeping above 68 degrees, considered a critical threshold. In warmer water, fish experience severe physical stress and become more vulnerable to fungal infections and predation.
The deteriorating conditions put a new spotlight on the perennial legal battle between salmon and power producers. And they serve as a vivid reminder of the environmental conditions threatening the Pacific Northwest and its core cultural and economic resources.
“A year like this year, where our region is experiencing some pretty heavy, if not severe, drought conditions in certain areas,” Bonifer said, “really puts us on our toes when it comes to monitoring these resources.”
The coming weeks are crucial for many migration cycles. But fish are far from the only concern.
Higher temperatures and drought also undermine hydroelectric power production, the backbone of the region’s electricity supply. Heat waves bring heightened demand for home cooling. The combination puts extraordinary pressure on the region’s electrical grid.
Oregon depends on a robust water system for many parts of its economy. Livestock. Agriculture. Data centers and other industrial customers. Homes and municipalities. They’re all thirsty consumers, and the system is oversubscribed.
“We are experiencing a real water supply issue, especially in many of our rivers and streams and reservoirs,” said Larry O’Neill, a professor and the director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University. Many waterways are trending toward record low flows, he said.
Advocates for fish and hydroelectric power often find themselves on opposite ends of debates and the courtroom. But both fear bleak outcomes amid this summer’s conditions and worry that years like this are becoming the new normal.
‘A really big moment’
For many, a federal agreement signed during Joe Biden’s presidency brought hope. But that sense of possibility has since been dashed.
In December 2023, the Biden administration signed the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative with Oregon, Washington and a group of tribes: the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Spring Reservation, and the Nez Perce Tribe.
That deal committed the federal government to spend more than $1 billion over the next decade to recover salmon populations and explore other forms of energy production in the region.
It sought to restore salmon and steelhead runs, expand clean energy production and address the long-running legal stalemate pitting fish conservation against power production. Part of the deal gave tribes power over how restoration funds are spent, and it initially allotted $300 million for fish and habitat restoration.
“That was the first real pause in that litigation, where the parties came together and found a path forward outside of court,” said Amanda Goodin, an attorney at Earthjustice. “It was a really big moment.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill lambasted the agreement, pointing to the region’s energy needs. Power producers criticized their omission from negotiations.
“Northwest public power must be included as a meaningful part of the (deal’s) efforts going forward,” the Public Power Council, a group representing publicly owned utilities who rely on Bonneville for most of their electricity, said at the time.
Last summer, President Donald Trump pulled the plug on the agreement, calling it “radical environmentalism.”
Kurt Miller, the executive director and CEO of Northwest Public Power Association, called the withdrawal a “necessary course correction toward energy reliability, affordability, and transparency.” Republicans in Congress applauded the move.
Environmental advocates, tribes and Oregon leaders pushed back.
“By walking away, the federal government has put salmon and steelhead on the brink of extinction and once again broken promises to tribal partners,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said when the state renewed litigation last September.
The Columbia Basin Fish Accords, another longstanding salmon restoration agreement signed in 2008, expired in October 2025. The Trump administration subsequently withheld $50 million in salmon recovery funding promised to the Yakama Nation under that deal.
Trump signed an executive order last year to boost the commercial fishing industry, a move conservationists said would further harm fish populations. And in June, BPA stunned state wildlife officials by pulling funding from a decades-long fisheries program, known as Select Area Fisheries Enhancement, or SAFE.
Debbie Colbert, director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in a statement at the time that the move put “decades of fishery reform work at risk.”
Back to square one
With a crucial part of the migration cycle starting, the region is in many ways back to square one in a year when environmental conditions are putting acute stress on the system.
Following the federal government’s decision to abandon the restoration initiative last summer, environmental groups, tribes and the state of Oregon filed a new lawsuit demanding protections for endangered salmon species in the rivers.
In February, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction mandating the implementation of a new spill regime at Columbia and Snake rivers dams — an operational plan that requires dam operators to send water through spillways rather than through power-producing turbines.
The plaintiffs celebrated the ruling, though not all their demands were met.
But the Public Power Council said the ruling would limit energy generation, making energy more expensive. And they argued sending the water over the dams’ spillways would make it harder for salmon to access fish ladders, installed at a cost of millions of dollars to help fish navigate past dams and reach spawning grounds.
“We’re seeing a drastic reduction in the output of the federal hydro system and we’ll continue to see that through the August and September period, when we have the least amount of water flow,” said Scott Simms, CEO and executive director of the Public Power Council.
The judge’s order is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Meanwhile, this year’s dry conditions have biologists like Jay Hesse on edge.
Hesse, the director of biological services at the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management, leads a department that manages fish hatcheries and trucks fish between waterways. Low water levels and warm temperatures make that job harder.
“The water temperatures are not as dire as what we saw in 2001, where we recorded extremely high pre-spawn mortality,” Hesse said. “But we’re just getting into that really sensitive time.”
There has been some relief. A better-than-usual Canadian snowpack turned what could have been a disastrous year into something closer to “not a great year” so far, according to Pete McHugh, a fish passage scientist at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
That said, the hydro system is operating at minimum flows, a level set by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s long-term modeling of salmon and steelhead survival. Conditions are delicate.
An ongoing El Niño raises more questions. In the Pacific Northwest, an El Niño event shifts the jet stream south and typically brings warmer, drier weather in the fall and winter, which could reduce snowpack again and prolong drought. Many forecasters are predicting the strongest El Niño on record, a phenomenon they suggest could bring wetter but significantly warmer weather when it peaks between October and December. The outcome is uncertain.
The most recent “super” El Niño was from fall 2015 to winter 2016, according to Lee Picard, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Portland.
Some see discomfiting parallels between 2015 and this year. That year, record temperatures, drought conditions and limited snowpack wreaked havoc on fish populations. Millions of fish across the Pacific Northwest died, and river temperatures killed over 90% of adult sockeye salmon returning to the Columbia Basin. Electricity generation from the region’s dams was down about 15%, according to O’Neill at OSU.
“Salmon have a generational lifespan of about four to six years,” Bonifer said. “And so when you see an impact to one generation, you’re going to feel those effects for quite a while.”
July was the hottest month recorded in U.S. history. And the state broke its all-time annual wildfire acreage record in early August. Those conditions point to the reality that years like this are becoming trends, not outliers.
“The looming concern is, on top of all this habitat loss and population decline, climate change is a real, growing threat,” said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s a real concern for the future of Pacific salmon.”
Environmental advocates and tribes say that the summer conditions are a reminder that habitat restoration and dam removal must be a priority moving forward.
Current conditions “put a spotlight on what was already unsustainable,” Goodin said. “Because even in good years, we’re still not doing a good job of meeting the varying needs in the basin.”
The Columbia River Basin used to be among the world’s greatest salmon-producing river systems, with about 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead annually. Today, over one-third of those populations are extinct.
Dams remain point of tension
The 2024 removal of four dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and California gave salmon access to spawning grounds that had been inaccessible for more than a century.
Fish returned almost immediately above the former dam sites. And in the fall of 2025, almost 40,000 Chinook returned to spawn in the Klamath River and its tributaries, almost double the pre-season forecast, according to the Pacific Fishery Management Council.
It was a victory for conservation groups and tribes that have long argued that many dams violate the Endangered Species Act and disregard treaties ensuring tribes have the right to harvest fish. They have filed dozens of lawsuits over the issue. The Klamath decision was a negotiated settlement after decades of activism and legal threats.
Yet dam breaching remains a third-rail issue in a region where electricity demand is surging, shortages are forecast, and states have mandated a switch to carbon-free electricity.
The power sold by the Bonneville Power Administration, generated at 31 hydroelectric dams and a nuclear plant, accounts for about one-third of the electricity generated in the Pacific Northwest, all of it free of greenhouse gas emissions. The dams also provide irrigation and control floods.
The future of the system is uncertain. A climate change study commissioned by BPA between 2018 and 2020 found that “average winter snowpacks are very likely to decline over time.” It predicted that by the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier spring runoff and longer periods of low summer flows are “very likely” in the Columbia River Basin.
According to the Oregon Department of Energy, hydro facilities are “increasingly constrained” by spillover or draw-down restrictions due to environmental concerns, tribal agreements and other water uses. Hydropower, the agency says, “is becoming less reliable due to changes associated with climate change.”
“If you take that system and then you overlay climate change on top of it, less snowpack in the winter, snowpack melting off sooner and less water flowing in rivers in the summertime,” said Oregon Wild conservation director Steve Pedery, “you have a recipe for pretty significant conflict and pretty big public costs.”
With that in mind, power producers and environmental advocates are looking to the future with anxiety. Many important questions remain unanswered, particularly around federal funding and how it may change in a future administration.
After the collapse of the Biden-era federal deal, many of the state-level agreements remain. Glass-half-full thinkers argue the agreement showed the parties involved that there is a capacity for teamwork.
As part of the agreement, utilities spilled more in the spring to help juvenile salmon move downstream quicker, and reduced spill levels in the summertime when fewer fish travel and more energy is required.
“That was a really good example of a balancing effect,” said Simms, with the Public Power Council. “Those are the kinds of things I think we can return to the table to work out. We’d love to get out of the litigation cycle.”
There are elements of agreement that are impossible without a cooperative federal government, which owns and operates most of the dams. But to many, this summer’s conditions have demonstrated that the status quo is unsustainable.
“We’re living right on the edge,” Hesse said. “If this pattern persists, it’s likely that we wouldn’t be as fortunate with the weather patterns, and then fish will have a major problem in the longer-term.”
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