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.
Mark your calendars now for our upcoming fall 2026
programs! Registration will open soon, so make sure
you’re among the first to hear by signing up for Foundation announcements!
Water Summit | October 29
Don’t miss the Water Education
Foundation’s 42ⁿᵈ annual Water
Summit in downtown Sacramento! Our premier event of
the year features leading policymakers and experts addressing
critical water issues in California and across the West.
Our Layperson’s
Guide to California Water has been completely
updated for 2026, providing a comprehensive overview of the
ways water is used, as well as its critical ecological role,
throughout the state. The 24-page publication traces the history
of the vital resource at the core of California’s identity,
politics and culture since its founding in 1850.
With the drought-riddled Colorado River careening toward crisis
levels in the coming months and seven Western states bitterly
deadlocked on how to share its diminished flows, one faction is
attempting to break off and go it alone. Over the past week,
the downstream states of Arizona, California and
Nevada have been negotiating feverishly over a
potential deal to divvy up water delivery cuts for the next few
years and develop a handful of tools for blunting the pain that
will stem from them. It’s a Hail Mary bid to exert some
control over their own fate as the Interior Department prepares
to begin unilaterally operating the river’s system of dams and
canals starting in October.
Utah has taken steps to rein in water use by large data centers
but conservationists and other advocates said more needs to be
done to protect the state’s dwindling water resources.
Lawmakers recently passed the Data Center Water Transparency
Amendments, which require server farm developers to provide an
estimate of future water use. The facilities often need
massive amounts of water to cool their servers,
particularly for artificial intelligence systems. … Utah
is a rapidly growing hub for data centers, featuring 48
operational facilities with more than 900 megawatts of
capacity.
A critical area of Tijuana’s wastewater system, which
repeatedly fails, sending millions of gallons of
untreated sewage a day into the binational Tijuana
River, is being upgraded. On Monday, officials with
Mexico and U.S. governments and the North American Development
Bank (NADBank) broke ground on a project to improve the PB1A
and PB1B lift stations. The pumps move wastewater from a larger
pump station in Tijuana, called PBCILA, across the U.S.-Mexico
border to the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment
Plant that’s located in the Tijuana River Valley. …
[O]fficials said they are also beginning work on a project,
dubbed Tijuana River Gates, to replace 35,700 feet of
deteriorated wastewater pipes along several sections of the
city’s wastewater collection system that repeatedly leak into
the Tijuana River.
The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful
heat engine that affects storms, fisheries and rainfall
patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely
to see if it’s about to boil over. Their projections
suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El
Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can
intensify and shift those impacts. … Climate scientists
also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño
events can trigger what they called “climate regime shifts,”
meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall and
drought patterns.
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.
