Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
Learn more about our team in the office and on the Board of
Directors and how you can support our nonprofit mission by
donating in someone’s honor or memory, or becoming a regular
contributor or supporting specific projects.
Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
As we head into summer, be sure to
mark your calendars for our popular fall programs which will all
be opening for registration soon!
Importantly, we will launch our first-ever Klamath River Tour to
visit the watershed and, among other things, see how the
river has responded to the dismantling of four obsolete dams. It
will not be an annual tour, so don’t miss this opportunity!
Check out the event dates and registration
details:
Big Day of
Giving is ending soon but you still have until
midnight to support the Water Education Foundation’s tours,
workshops, publications and other programs with a donation to help us reach our
$10,000 fundraising goal - we are only $2,502
away!
At the Foundation, we believe that education is as precious
as water. Your donations help us every day to teach K-12
educators how to bring water science into the classroom and to
empower future decision-makers through our professional
development programs.
Concerningly low amounts of water are flowing from Rocky
Mountain snowpack this spring, a summer of drought looms across
swaths of the West, and the negotiators tasked with devising a
sustainable long-term water plan for the 40 million people who
rely on the Colorado River are running out of time.
Commissioners from the seven states in the Colorado River Basin
— Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California and
Nevada — must create a plan that will govern how those states
divvy up the river’s water after the current guidelines expire
at the end of 2026. As the river shrinks due to drought and
climate change, the negotiators must decide who will take less
water — and they need to do so in the next few months. … The
negotiators, who met in Las Vegas this week, have repeatedly
said they are committed to finding a consensus solution, but
have not yet done so and have already blown past previous
deadlines set by federal authorities more than a year ago.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling on the Trump administration to do
more to harden California’s forests to fire as the state
fast-tracks plans of its own to confront the wildfire threat.
On Friday, the governor announced $72 million of funding for a
slew of large-scale forest resiliency projects, primarily
tree-thinning and prescribed burns. All of the projects qualify
for an expedited environmental review process initiated by
Newsom in March for fire safety work. … The state funding
announced this week will go to 12 forestry projects, from
pulling out highly combustible weeds and planting
fire-resistant trees in San Bernardino County to paring back
overgrown forests with proactive burns in Humboldt County. One
$7 million project would create a “ring” of protected space
around communities in Santa Cruz County. Another project,
costing $4.2 million, seeks to improve the health of forests in
the upper Mokelumne River watershed in the
central Sierra Nevada.
The San Diego County Water Authority and Metropolitan Water
District are set to announce a historic settlement of decades
of legal disputes following the 2003 deal to purchase water
from Imperial Valley farmers. The disputes are insanely
complex and they have cost San Diego ratepayers an estimated
$20 million in legal fees. … The Water Authority agreed to
purchase water for several decades from IID. It also invested
heavily in lining the canals that bring water from the
Colorado River, saving significant amounts of
water that had been lost to seepage. … The settlement
will set a framework for the Water Authority to sell water to
other Southern California water agencies or to Metropolitan
itself. And Metropolitan has agreed to even allow the Water
Authority to sell water out of state, if it’s not needed here.
The Trump administration’s proposed budget for 2026 slashes
about 90 percent of the funding for one of the country’s
cornerstone biological and ecological research programs. Known
as the Ecosystems Mission Area, the program is part of the U.S.
Geological Survey and studies nearly every aspect of the
ecology and biology of natural and human-altered landscapes and
waters around the country. The 2026 proposed budget allocates
$29 million for the project, a cut from its current funding
level of $293 million. The budget proposal also reduces funds
for other programs in the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as
other federal science agencies. … The E.M.A. is also a
core part of federal climate research. The Trump administration
has sharply reduced or eliminated funds for climate science
across federal agencies, calling the study of climate change
part of “social agenda” research in an earlier version of the
budget proposal.
Other water and environmental project funding news:
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought—an extended period of
limited or no precipitation—is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
During California’s 2012–2016 drought, much of the state
experienced severe drought conditions: significantly less
precipitation and snowpack, reduced streamflow and higher
temperatures. Those same conditions reappeared early in 2021
prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom in May to declare drought emergencies
in watersheds across 41 counties in California.
