A recent article in The Washington Post explained several states in the United States are stressing their limited water supplies. Among them are Colorado and the San Luis Valley, which are in the high risk of stress.

The article is about a report from the World Resource Institute (WRI) that there are pockets in the country — and around the globe — that is “draining their limited water supplies.”

The report used over 50 years of data in 189 countries to estimate an area’s demand for water. “The result was a scale of ‘water stress’ — how close a country comes to draining its annual water stores in a typical year,” it says.

The United States ranked 71st out of 189 countries that are “low to medium on the stress scale” while Colorado is ranked fourth (behind New Mexico, California and Arizona). At the bottom of the list is Washington, D.C.

New Mexico is the only state to be extremely high in water stress because residents use 80 percent of the annual supply of water. Thus, leaving 20 percent extra which can be used quickly during a drought or “an increase in demand from population or industry growth.” Arizona is in a similar situation, just not as bad.

The southwest states are mostly arid and therefore “in the most precarious positions when it comes to water, Paul Reig, an environmental scientist who worked on the report said.

Because of its population, California uses more water than any of the other 49 states. There are “huge demands” for water from the agriculture and population centers. With climate change, more water is being used in Los Angeles and San Diego which are getting hotter and drier, the report says.