Illinois is dangerously dry. Decades of policy negligence have left the state unprepared, and the crisis is only beginning.

Last week, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed parts of 19 Central Illinois counties are suffering from “extreme drought.” That means we’re looking at “major crop/pasture losses, extreme fire danger, widespread water shortages or restrictions,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All of Champaign County, where I live, is in an extreme drought.

Statewide, 80.88% of Illinois is under some level of drought and another 15% is “abnormally dry.” Over 90% of Lake, Kane and McHenry counties are currently “abnormally dry,” and portions of Cook, Will and DuPage counties are as well, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The downstate city of Sullivan declared a water emergency after the water table dropped 15 feet in recent months; residents are restricted to essential use only. Bloomington is asking residents to voluntarily conserve water. Wells are running low, rivers are down, and farmers describe the situation heading into the growing season as “nerve-wracking.”

This drought must be understood in the context of Illinois’ land use decisions. Between fall harvest and spring planting, millions of acres of Illinois cropland sit bare, soil exposed to wind and rain. If the drought persists into planting season, spring winds could bring more of the dust storms that have plagued the state in recent years.

The Illinois State Climatologist, which provides weather and climate data, flagged a “blowing dust risk” last fall, when conditions were less severe than what we have now.

Making matters worse, roughly 10 million acres of Illinois farmland are equipped with subsurface tile drainage, designed to move water off fields and into waterways as quickly as possible, ultimately sending it, along with hundreds of millions of pounds of nutrient pollution, to the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds a massive dead zone. Few drainage systems have control structures, so water leaves the land whether we need it or not. In a drought, that’s water we can’t get back.

Then there are the lost wetlands. Illinois has destroyed 90% of its historic wetlands, natural sponges that could be storing water during dry periods. Of the 10% that remain, roughly 90% have been stripped of Clean Water Act protections due to recent federal rollbacks.

But wait, there’s more. Hyperscale data centers — which can use millions of gallons of water each day — are muscling into communities across the state.

Update water use laws

All of this would be alarming enough on its own. What makes it genuinely dangerous is Illinois has no meaningful framework for managing its water.

Historically, Illinois has been water-rich. If anything, our problem has been too much water, evidenced by flooded fields, roads and basements. That abundance bred complacency. The state never updated its water use laws, which remain rooted in English common law from centuries ago. The “reasonable use” rules we still rely on today were literally made for another place and another time, and are not equipped to address the water consumption of a highly industrialized society.

Apart from Lake Michigan, there is no oversight, no permitting, no real management. Any landowner can pull water from a river or well and use as much as they want, until they impact another landowner’s right to “reasonable use.” Conflicts are resolved only after the fact, in court — a slow, expensive process that does nothing to help us plan and manage water for the future.

While large water users are statutorily required to report their withdrawals, the requirement isn’t enforced and carries no penalties, so compliance is abysmal. State officials have told me maybe half of large water users report their use to the state. For agricultural irrigation, reporting levels are even lower. We cannot plan for the future of a shared resource when we don’t know who is using what.

The proliferation of data centers has led advocates to draft and introduce the Protecting Our Water, Energy and Ratepayers, or POWER, Act, which would require data centers to disclose their water use and its impact on other users, while also ensuring they pay the true cost of their energy consumption rather than shifting it onto communities. The bill is necessary and urgent. But data centers are just one class of high-capacity users. Even if it passes, every other large withdrawer remains ungoverned.

That must change.

Enforcing the state’s existing reporting requirement is the obvious first step. We can’t manage what we don’t measure.

This drought should be ringing alarm bells in Springfield. The emergency is here. And even if rain comes this spring and the drought temporarily eases, the future of water in Illinois looks very different than the past. We’ve had decades of policy negligence. We have to start managing this most essential of resources, and we have to start now.

Robert Hirschfeld is director of water policy at Prairie Rivers Network.