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.
Since 1977, the Water Education
Foundation has worked to inspire better understanding
and catalyze critical conversations about our most vital
natural resource: water.
This is not a mission our nonprofit can carry out alone.
Today on Giving Tuesday, a global day of philanthropy, please
consider making a
tax-deductible donation to support the important
work we do to provide impartial education and foster informed
decision-making on water issues in California and the West.
Today on Giving Tuesday, a global
day of philanthropy, you can support impartial education and
informed decision-making on water resources in California and the
West by making a
tax-deductible donation to the Water Education
Foundation.
Your support ensures that our legacy of producing in-depth news,
educational workshops and accessible and
reliable information on water reaches new heights in 2026.
The Bureau of Reclamation on Thursday updated the long-term
operations plan for the Central Valley Project to allow
increased exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a move
that conflicts with California’s own requirements, potentially
shifts more of the water burden onto the state and threatens
the Delta’s ecosystem and water quality. … The
Reclamation Bureau stated that under the updated plan, the
federal-managed CVP could gain an additional 130,000 to 180,000
acre-feet of water a year — roughly 40 billion to 60 billion
gallons — while the State Water Project could see an increase
of 120,000 to 220,000 acre-feet, or about 39 billion to 70
billion gallons.
The state of Colorado is ramping up an effort to measure water
use on the Western Slope, developing rules and standards and
rolling out a grant program to help water users pay for
diversion measurement devices. With input from water users,
officials from the Colorado Division of Water Resources are
creating technical guidance for each of the four major Western
Slope river basins on how agricultural water users should
measure the water they take from streams. … The
push for more-accurate measurement comes at a time when there
is increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, as well
as growing pressure on the Colorado River’s Upper
Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming)
to conserve water.
San Luis Obispo County can reduce the amount of water it
releases from Lopez Dam, a federal court ruled [last week].
Lopez Lake supplies drinking water to about 50,000 South County
residents. … After a coalition of environmental groups
sued the county, a U.S. District Court judge ordered the county
last year to release more water from Lopez Dam to support
steelhead trout migration through Arroyo
Grande Creek. The county appealed the decision on Jan. 24,
saying that releasing the prescribed amount of water into the
creek would wash away the eggs of two other protected
species: the tidewater goby and the California
red-legged frog.
A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded
a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US.
… The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by
companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of
billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the
huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects,
worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to
local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’
need for huge amounts of water to cool down
equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier
areas where supplies are scarce.
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.
