… Today, 40% of the irrigated land in the (Central) Valley
still depends on flood irrigation. It’s a method that served
its purpose for decades but no longer aligns with current
challenges. It’s inefficient and costly—not just for the
farmer, but for the entire community that relies on that water.
And perhaps most concerning: many producers remain locked into
this system not due to lack of will, but due to lack of access
to the capital required to transition. But change is already
taking shape. A new generation of companies,
organizations, and public-private initiatives is proving that
it’s possible to reduce water use without compromising
productivity. And even more importantly: that this model of
water stewardship benefits every actor involved. Every cubic
meter of water saved creates value—for the companies financing
technology adoption, for the farmers implementing it on their
land, and for the communities that depend on water to
thrive. –Written by Jairo Trad, CEO & Co-Founder of Kilimo.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on
April 22, 2025, settlements with 10 entities with facilities
across California for claims of chemical safety-related
violations under the Clean Air Act. Two water treatment plants
were listed in EPA’s expedited settlement agreements. All
entities agreed to come into compliance with Risk Management
Program (RMP) safety requirements and pay penalties, which
total over $170,000. According to the EPA, two water
treatment plants in the state of California had violations:
Benecia Water Treatment Plant … (and) Cement Hill Water
Treatment Plant.
Join us at our annual open house and reception on May 1
at our office near the Sacramento River to meet our team
and learn more about our work. Drop by anytime from 3:30
p.m. to 6:30 p.m. to enjoy happy hour refreshments and
appetizers while chatting with our team about our tours,
conferences, maps, publications and training programs for
teachers and up-and-coming water
professionals. RSVP here!
We are also gearing up for a busy post-summer programs schedule
packed with opportunities to get out and learn. For
now, save the dates:
Our first-ever Klamath River Tour: Sept. 8-12
Annual Water Summit: Oct. 1
Northern California Tour: Oct. 22-24
And our latest Western Water story from our journalism team
explores the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation
Program at its halfway point. Read
the full story here.
Securing the proper legal documents to protect their water
rights often takes time and money that tribes can’t afford.
That’s why the Native American Rights Fund’s Tribal Water
Institute created The Headwaters Report. The report breaks down
the ins and outs of tribal water law, updates what’s going on
in the courts and Congress, and highlights what water issues
are on the horizon. Daniel Cordalis, a staff attorney with the
Colorado-based group, said some tribes will pay third-party
firms thousands of dollars a month to provide them with that
information. “And it’s information every tribe should have,” he
continued. “And the cost is a barrier to getting this kind of
information for a lot of tribal nations, and it shouldn’t be
one. I think it lifts the whole tribal communities up if
they’re able to have the same information.”
During a tour of the Western Slope last week, U.S. Sen.
John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said he was frustrated with the
pace of negotiations that could determine how the
Colorado River is shared in the future and
that the Upper Basin states may be pushing back too hard. A
deal should have been reached last summer, he said. “Colorado
should have a right to keep the water that we have been using
the way we’ve been using it, and I don’t think we should
compromise that,” Hickenlooper said. … The seven states that
use water from the Colorado River – Arizona, California and
Nevada comprise the Lower Basin – have just over a month left
to agree on how the nation’s two largest reservoirs would be
operated and cuts shared in the future before the federal
government may decide for them.
… In California, our groundwater system is out of balance.
More water is going out than is coming in, which is causing a
host of problems—falling water levels, domestic wells going
dry, land subsidence, ecosystems under stress, and water
quality problems. There’s a lot of space in the aquifers after
all the groundwater pumping, and natural recharge isn’t filling
it adequately. We could supplement with managed aquifer
recharge (MAR). That means sending the excess water in wet
years to locations where it can move downward and replenish our
groundwater systems. Spreading water in a dedicated recharge
basin, agricultural field, or floodplain could move it
efficiently down below the surface, depending on the geologic
characteristics of the site.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday
that Mexico must stop the flow of billions of gallons of sewage
and toxic chemicals from Tijuana that has polluted the Pacific
Ocean off neighboring Southern California, closing beaches and
sickening Navy SEALs who train in the water. Lee Zeldin made
the demand during an Earth Day trip to the California-Mexico
border, where he toured a plant in San Diego County that treats
the sewage as a secondary facility and flew along the frontier
to see the Tijuana River. He also was scheduled to meet with
SEALs. Zeldin said that in the next day or so, his agency will
present Mexico a to-do list of projects to resolve the
decades-long environmental crisis, but he stopped short of
specifying how the Trump administration would hold Mexico
accountable if it does not act.
Earth’s landmasses are holding onto a lot less water than they
used to — and this loss is not just due to melting ice sheets.
Terrestrial water storage, which includes water in underground
aquifers, lakes, rivers and the tiny pore spaces within soil,
declined by trillions of metric tons in the early 21st century,
researchers report in the March 28 Science. This sharp decrease
in freshwater stores is driven by rising temperatures on land
and in the oceans, which in turn are linked to an increased
global incidence of drought. And given the projected warming of
the planet, this trend isn’t likely to change any time soon,
say geophysicist Ki-Weon Seo of Seoul National University and
colleagues.
(From news release:) Anticipated water demands for Klamath
Project water contractors are likely to be met as the Klamath
Basin hydrology pivots from consecutive years of drought.
Described in the 2025
Klamath Project Annual Operations Plan, today’s
initial water supply allocations from the Bureau of Reclamation
are based on modeled estimates of water available for
irrigation delivery and incorporate current reservoir storage,
precipitation, and snowpack, as well as projected inflow
forecasts. … The 2025 Plan is used as a planning and
information tool by water users and details the volume of water
available for Project irrigated agriculture as well as water
reserved to meet Endangered Species Act requirements in the
Klamath River and Upper Klamath Basin.
Microplastics, tiny plastic particles found in everyday
products from face wash to toothpaste, are an emerging threat
to health and ecology, prompting a research team to identify
what keeps them trapped in stream ecosystems. Everyday
actions like washing synthetic clothing and driving, which
wears down tires, contribute to an accumulation of
microplastics in environments from city dust to waterways.
These plastics often carry toxic chemicals that can threaten
the health of humans and wildlife.”We are the key source of
microplastics,” said Shannon Speir, assistant professor and
researcher in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food
and Life Sciences, and for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment
Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System
Division of Agriculture.
… In an order issued Thursday, (Interior Secretary Doug)
Burgum put Tyler Hassen, who came to the Interior Department as
a representative of the U.S. DOGE Service, in charge of a
sweeping effort to “create significant efficiencies” and
eliminate “redundant efforts” across the department. Hassen’s
broad portfolio includes IT, human resources, training,
financial management, international affairs, contracting,
communications and other tasks. … Hassen’s decisions
could have major implications for how Interior — which is
responsible for maintaining national parks, protecting
endangered species, and overseeing drilling in public lands and
waters — operates going forward. … One
of Hassen’s first tasks after President Donald Trump’s
inauguration was visiting a Northern California water pumping
station to push one of Trump’s long-standing priorities:
rerouting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other
parts of the state.
Following in the footsteps of other federal science agencies
under President Donald Trump’s administration, the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week ordered its
staff to start canceling grants already awarded to universities
and research institutes, according to an agency source and an
email seen by Science. Although EPA is not a large funder of
R&D compared with other federal agencies, it does provide
$35 million to $40 million each year to researchers studying
the impacts of pollution and ways to reduce them. The internal
email, sent between senior agency administrators, gave no
reason for scrapping the grants, but the Trump administration
has also been downsizing EPA activities in other ways. Since
Trump took office, EPA has scrapped $1.5 billion in grants for
environmental justice and frozen $20 billion in funding for
clean energy and efficiency programs.
… This month, the (University of Colorado Boulder) team
published a new study, led by Eckland, in Water Resources
Research. The analysis draws on their 2021 field season and
parses information about sediment and organic carbon in river
water for a surprising result. Reservoirs like Elephant Butte
may sequester organic carbon within layers of sediment,
especially during periods of drought and flash floods.
Essentially, the reservoir acts as a carbon sink, trapping
organic material that would otherwise emit carbon dioxide
through natural decay. The explanation lies in physics.
Normally, when water flows into a reservoir, it spreads out
over the surface. But if the river picks up enough sediment,
the process flips upside down. Instead of the river water
fanning out on top, an underwater current plunges it downward.
Scientists call this a “hyperpycnal plume.”
Humans have the technology to literally make snow fall from the
clouds. In the drought-stricken Southwest, where the
Colorado River needs every drop of water it
can get, there are calls to use it more. Utah, home to the
nation’s largest cloud seeding program, is at the crossroads of
the technology’s past and future. The state has become a
proving ground for cloud seeding in the West, with water
managers, private sector investors, and conspiracy theorists
keeping a close eye on their progress. … Utah’s
cloud seeding program is being closely watched by others around
the region. Its efforts cover more ground than any other state
in the nation, and it has one of the strongest bases of state
funding. For that reason, other water-short states in the
Western U.S. are keeping an eye on how much return on
investment Utah is getting from a $5 million annual cloud
seeding budget and those efficiency-boosting tech upgrades.
The mountain yellow-legged frogs of Yosemite National Park are
in an epic fight for survival. Theirs is a tale of devastation
and redemption, luck and suspense, and amphibians in
helicopters. And in an era of grim headlines about the state of
nature, a recent UC study about them offers a rare glimmer of
hope: These frogs, which were plagued nearly to extinction by a
deadly fungus just a few years ago, are now poised for a
comeback. This Earth Day, we’re celebrating stories from the
past year of UC research that illustrate the resilience of life
on our planet and demonstrate the power of humans to help solve
problems of our own making.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) and Foster Poultry Farms
have reached a settlement of the lawsuit filed against Foster
Poultry Farms in 2020. ALDF’s complaint alleged that Foster
Poultry Farms unreasonably uses water to slaughter and process
chickens at its poultry-processing plant in Livingston,
California in violation of Article X, section 2 of the
California Constitution, which mandates that all water use in
the State of California must be reasonable. While Foster
Poultry Farms completely denies ALDF’s allegations regarding
its water use and animal welfare practices, it has agreed to
continue to work to improve water conservation and animal
welfare at its Livingston poultry-processing plant, which is
the largest chicken poultry-processing plant on the West Coast.
The state of California has adopted a new framework to
coordinate a response to the recent discovery of golden
mussels, an invasive species that can wreak havoc on local
ecosystems. … In December 2024, the California Fish and
Game Commission voted to list golden mussels as a restricted
species. To help contain and suppress the invasive shellfish,
the California state government has unveiled a comprehensive
Golden Mussel Response Framework. … Among the measures
called for in the framework are an investigation into how
golden mussels can spread, increased inspection and
decontamination of watercraft, and an education campaign.
Knights Ferry has a major drinking water problem in its small
water system, and it’s had it for a long time. The residents
have largely learned to live with the near constant leaks,
equipment failures and sporadic shutoffs. The community was
established in the 1850s on the northeastern edge of Stanislaus
County. Home to the longest covered bridge west of the
Mississippi and a park run by the Army Corps of Engineers, it’s
a destination by out-of-towners for recreational opportunities
and preserved Gold Rush-era history.
On a hot day, there’s nothing quite like a refreshing drink of
water. But how would you feel if that water was sourced from
the sewer? As cities across the West brace for a drier future,
they’re investing in advanced water purification technology. It
flushes out the contaminants in wastewater so that the murky
stuff that goes down your toilet can eventually come out ready
to drink at your sink. “There’s a lot of uncertainty here in
terms of water resources, so we think that this is that next
bucket of water that we need to tap into,” said Nazario Prieto,
assistant director of Phoenix Water Services. The city of 1.6
million people is building its first advanced water
purification plant that could eventually process up to 15
million gallons of wastewater a day.
The Trump administration on Monday demanded the resignation of
the top federal official overseeing a dispute between the
United States and Mexico over untreated sewage flowing across
the border into California. Maria-Elena Giner, who leads
the International Boundary and Water Commission, said in an
interview Monday that White House officials asked her to resign
by the end of the day and threatened to fire her
otherwise. The commission plays a crucial role in
navigating cross-border water conflicts, including the
[Colorado River], ongoing sewage crisis facing coastal
California communities and dwindling water deliveries to
farmers in South Texas.
