A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Vik Jolly.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing.
We occasionally bold words in the text to ensure the water connection is clear.
The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
The Trump administration plans to weaken environmental
protections for threatened fish in California’s
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and pump
more water to Central Valley farmlands, according to letters
obtained by the Los Angeles Times. … The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation recently notified California agencies that it plans
to pump more water out of the delta into the southbound
aqueducts of the federally operated Central Valley Project. …
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote that it is
concerned about weakened protections for winter-run and
spring-run chinook salmon, steelhead trout, delta smelt and
longfin smelt.
The San Joaquin Basin faces significant water management
challenges due to decades of groundwater overdraft and severe
floods. According to the Department of Water Resources, their
newly released San Joaquin Basin Flood-MAR Watershed Studies
highlight strategies to address these issues across several
watersheds, including Calaveras, Stanislaus and
Tuolumne. The studies emphasize capturing and storing
floodwater underground, known as Flood-Managed Aquifer
Recharge, as a key strategy. This approach aims to transform
extreme weather events into opportunities to replenish
groundwater and support ecosystems.
The holiday season in the Kaweah subbasin got a little more
jolly thanks to its formal removal from the state’s groundwater
enforcement process on Tuesday. The state Water Resources
Control Board passed a resolution at its Dec. 2 meeting that
officially ended the threat of state intervention for the
Kaweah subbasin, which covers the northern part of Tulare
County’s flatlands and a portion of Kings County. It will
continue to work under Department of Water Resources oversight
to implement plans to reduce excessive groundwater pumping.
The Imperial Irrigation District (IID) on Dec. 2 announced its
transition from the Salton Sea Authority to the State of
California’s newly established Salton Sea Conservancy. IID’s
transition in participation from the Salton Sea Authority to
the Conservancy will strengthen alignment among state and
federal agencies and facilitate project operations and
management. This next step reflects a natural evolution of
IID’s long-standing leadership in Salton Sea progress that has
led from studies to planning to on-the-ground projects, along
with ongoing efforts to restore habitat and address regional
air quality concerns.
Amazon Web Services has pulled out of its long-planned role as
future operator of the Project Blue data center complex on the
Tucson area’s far southeast side, three sources told the Star.
Amazon has left the embattled project because its operations
aren’t compatible with the project’s recently announced plans
to use air cooling instead of water cooling of the data
centers’ servers. … Project Blue officials had pledged
to build a $100 million pipeline to deliver reclaimed water to
the data centers. But outside critics said the city would be
unable to effectively enforce those and other water-related
requirements for the project, including a commitment by the
company to be “water positive.”
Congressman Ken Calvert introduced the Agua Caliente Band of
Cahuilla Indians Water Rights Settlement Act, or H.R. 5935, on
Monday. … The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians
Water Rights Settlement Act ratifies that the Tribe has a
federally reserved water right up to 20,000 acre-feet per year
of groundwater from the Indio Subbasin that is
held in trust by the U.S. for the Tribe and individual
allottees. The Tribe would also have surface water
rights in Tahquitz Creek, Andreas Creek, and
Whitewater Ranch, held in trust by the U.S.
Alter Terra, a binational environmental group, is sounding the
alarm about the need to dredge the Tijuana River channel just
inside U.S. territory to avoid massive flooding near and around
the San Ysidro Port of Entry. The group says the floor of the
channel has risen by 10 feet over the years, meaning it will
take less water for the river to crest over its levees.
… The sediment is made up of sludge from raw sewage,
dirt from construction sites, soil from Tijuana hillsides and
other materials that come in from Mexico. … The other
option is to raise the levees, which requires congressional
approval and major funding.
The year’s first allocation from California’s massive water
storage and delivery system has been set at just 10 percent of
requested supplies, officials with the state Department of
Water Resources announced Monday. DWR operates the
State Water Project, which delivers water to
29 public water agencies that serve an estimated 27 million
people and 750,000 acres of farmland throughout the
state. DWR is required to set its initial annual water
allocation by Dec. 1 every year and the size of the allocation
is typically fairly small at first. As the rainy season
develops, however, if the state sees an increase in rain and
snowfall totals, water allocations could potentially increase
every month.
Governor Gavin Newsom has made significant strides in securing
and enhancing water supplies, including improving the state’s
ability to capture stormwater. Fortified by state investment to
strengthen and expand California’s local water infrastructure,
eight major, state-funded projects completed or broke ground
across California this fall—including water recycling,
wastewater treatment and desalination facilities—that benefit
over 1 million people. Collectively, the projects add about 2.9
billion gallons annually to the state’s water supplies, enough
water for roughly 20,000 homes per year.
Colorado River water negotiations are ongoing as the basin
states now face a Feb. 14 deadline to submit a final agreement
to the U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of
Reclamation. At the Western Governors Association winter
meeting in Paradise Valley, Gov. Katie Hobbs accused the upper
basin states of running out the clock by not putting proposals
on the table as the previous Nov. 11 deadline passed without a
deal. … In the meantime, Hobbs said she will continue to
fight for the water Arizona needs. … “Our users will not
accept a deal where we are waiving our rights to the water that
the upper basin owes us,” Hobbs said.
A new study shows that during drought, it’s not how hot or how
dry it is that determines gas emissions from plants—but how
quickly conditions change. This discovery reshapes our
understanding of the relationship between drought,
vegetation, and air pollution. The research …
reveals a striking phenomenon: when the weather shifts
rapidly—for example, a sharp increase in humidity or a sudden
drop in temperature—vegetation responds immediately by changing
the rate at which it emits naturally occurring biogenic
volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) into the air. … The paper
is published in the journal Science of The Total Environment.
Residents who frequent Loveland Reservoir are again raising
alarms about water being drained from the area’s largest public
open-space reservoir. The concerns come three years after the
reservoir was lowered to deadpool levels, killing off the fish
population and severely impacting
recreation. … Anglers say the fish population was
just beginning to recover from the previous draining.
… Residents also worry the lower water levels will
affect firefighting resources. … A spokesperson for
Sweetwater Authority confirmed the agency is conducting
controlled water transfers to “continue providing safe and
reliable water to our South Bay ratepayers.”
A gadget capable of extracting evaporation from tomato pulp is
producing 120,000 gallons a day of “new water” clean enough to
drink in Los Banos in Merced County. The “water harvesting”
unit was developed by Australian company Botanical Water
Technologies, which moved to the United States around five
years ago. The Ingomar Packing Company in Los Banos processes
tomato products such as tomato paste and diced tomatoes. …
Greg Pruett, Ingomar CEO, says in a promotional video about the
program that the company had a large volume of condensate water
from the tomatoes that was “…not being used in a valuable way.”
So when it learned about Botanical and its work extracting and
purifying such water, it was a good fit.
… From small, rural regions to low-income urban communities,
those with the fewest resources are supported by some of the
smallest water systems with limited resources. This year,
however, brought some welcome relief. Thanks to Governor Newsom
and legislative champions like Assemblymember Blanca Rubio,
California passed Assembly Bill 428, a new law tackling one of
the most painful, and familiar, cost pressures Californians
face: skyrocketing insurance premiums. … The
measure now allows water corporations to join with mutual water
companies and public water agencies to pool resources and buy
insurance together. – Written by Adán Ortega, executive director of
CalMutuals.
The invasive pest spotlight focuses on emerging or potential
invasive pests in California. In this issue we are covering
nutria. The nutria is a large semi-aquatic rodent
introduced to California in the early 1900s to be farmed for
their fur. … Nutria have since spread into waterways
within the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Central
Valley. … Nutria severely damage the environment,
roads, levees, and crops. They burrow into banks of waterways,
weakening or collapsing them. As they feed, they damage the
native plant communities and soil structure of wetlands. Nutria
feeding and burrowing damage both increase the risk of erosion
and flooding.
The Department of Water Resources said Monday the State Water
Project will supply 10% of the water that local agencies
requested for the new water year. The initial number is based
on current weather and water conditions, how much water is
stored in reservoirs and the assumption that the rest of the
year could be drier than normal, the state agency said. The
allocation is then adjusted month-to-month based on new data,
with a final number typically set in May or June. … In
Monday’s statement, the agency added that the
reservoirs statewide are slightly above
normal, at 114% of average typical for this time of
year.
A Trump administration proposal to reduce the scope of the
Clean Water Act would exclude more waters than
at any other point in the past 50 years. But it also left open
the possibility of going even further. Administration officials
last week unveiled their plan to define “waters of the U.S.,” a
frequently litigated term that delineates which waters and
wetlands are regulated by the 1972 law. … [The proposal]
suggests including only rivers, streams and other waterways
that flow at least for the duration of the “wet season.” The
proposal also floats an alternative approach: exclusively
regulating perennial waters and wetlands.
… The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is
forecasting La Niña conditions for this winter, possibly
switching to neutral midway through. … When we look at the
consequences for snow, La Niña does tend to mean more snow in
the Pacific Northwest and less in the Southwest. … This
winter’s forecast isn’t extreme at this point, so the impact on
the year’s water supplies is a pretty big question mark. …
The West’s water infrastructure system was built assuming there
would be a natural reservoir of snow in the mountains.
California relies on the snowpack for about a third of
its annual water supply. However, rising temperatures
are leading to earlier snowmelt in some areas.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
… A 2024 federal report found that U.S. data centers consume
17 billion gallons of water a year, but that’s a drop in the
bucket compared to industries like mining or farming, which use
billions of gallons every day. But demand from data centers is
expected to double or even quadruple soon, according to that
report. … By 2027, AI is expected to account for
28% of the global data center market, according to Goldman
Sachs. … This data center boom is not just happening in
northern Nevada. Across the West, including Colorado,
Wyoming and Arizona, states have rolled out major tax
incentives to attract data centers, but rising concern over
their water use is fueling public pushback.
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. In 2025, your gifts
helped make many WEF projects possible, including
Project WET
workshops, our Water Leaders programs, the
online magazine Western
Waterand more. Please donate
today to help us make an even greater impact in
2026.
