The Western United States is currently facing a megadrought — the worst in America within the past 1,200 years. Citizens have been required to reduce their water usage, and Indigenous populations have fought to even access the vital resource.

But golf courses were still watered.

According to U.S. Geological Survey water usage data from 2022, the state of Utah used 38 million gallons of water per day on golf courses at the height of the drought. Only about 250,000 people in the state participate in golfing — just 8 percent of the population.

“We are dedicating a lot of water to a resource that very few people are using on a daily or weekly basis when we could use that water for a soccer field that hundreds more people are going to use,” Alessandro Rigolon, professor of of city and metropolitan planning at the University of Utah, previously told DesertNews. “In a context of competition and scarcity for water, using that water for a hobby that only a few do is subsidizing that hobby.”

Today, there are an estimated 1,504,210 acres of golf courses across the United States, which use approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water every day, per a United States Golf Association report. The majority pull from nearby ponds and lakes.

While that may seem small in comparison to the amount used by the agriculture industry, farming employs a significantly higher number of people, and produces food directly beneficial to the population. Keiser University found that the golf industry creates approximately 2 million jobs, whereas the agriculture industry is 10.5 percent of U.S. employment with over 21 million jobs, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Golf is also a sport usually only available to the wealthy. While 75 percent of the roughly 30,000 facilities across the country are open to the public, according to the National Golf Foundation, the average cost of an 18-hole game falls at $36.

“Despite members of the working class being able to access the sport, the sort of social imagination and material reality of the sport is very different,” Hugo Ceron-Anaya, professor of sociology at Lehigh University, added. “You have wealthier-than-average folks playing, and that, I think, is part of the tension.”

Many golf courses have reduced their water usage in the past few decades. In 2021, the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America reported that water use dropped by 29 percent between 2005 and 2020. While this marks an improvement, today's numbers show there is no way to maintain a golf course without substantial resources.

In the May 2010 issue of Human Rights Quarterly, University of Connecticut political science professor Richard P. Hiskes analyzed the impact of golf courses on their local communities around the world. He wrote that "a golf course's impact on neighboring communities and, by implication, on a global water system is, therefore, a legitimate focus of human rights litigation and advocacy."

"Local governments have additional obligations to help realize the fulfillment of the human right to water than merely the regulation of golf courses," Hiskes said, continuing, "Golf's unexpected and somewhat startling impression on global water supplies proves how such a commonplace activity, pursued in towns large and small across the globe, impacts human rights in ways and places we need to appreciate more fully."

The solution is to close golf courses, especially in vulnerable areas. “You don’t get rid of all of them, of course,” Rigolon said, though strategic closures could not only save water, but also provide accessible public green space, and even housing. Research also shows that shifting away from grass lawns, and landscaping with biodiverse plants, immensely benefits pollinators and ecosystems.

"Human rights are at stake," Hiskes concluded, adding, "How we as citizens participate and make decisions in those politics at every level will determine the fate of the earth's environment and our place in it. As part of our inheritance of environmental human rights, the human right to water must not be exhausted by the living nor damned by the sporting proclivities of the present generation. Its flow belongs to all people now and in the future."