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.
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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.
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
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A major November deadline for Colorado River negotiations
passed without resolution, though hope remains for an agreement
to avoid federal intervention. … What’s being negotiated are
the future operating guidelines for the two large storage
reservoirs. The guidelines must be realistic and resilient and
not allow one reservoir to be drained to shore up the other, as
has happened in recent years. Both reservoirs have hovered near
critical levels for a few years. These talks are critical for
Colorado Springs. Half of the city’s water comes from the
Colorado River Basin through trans-basin diversions that cross
the Continental Divide.
The Paso Robles Area Groundwater Authority needs help funding
its operating costs next year. On Monday, the agency’s Board of
Directors approved a budget of $944,952 for fiscal year 2025-26
— with a $300,000 shortfall for costs planned for January to
June of next year. The agency’s Board of Directors was
forced to abandon water use fees after a majority of property
owners objected to them this year. Now, the agency is looking
for other ways to cover its operating costs. … On
Monday, the board voted unanimously to ask the four
participating Groundwater Sustainability Agencies to contribute
a combined total of $300,000 to bridge the funding gap.
University of Arizona researchers are testing natural plant
additives called biostimulants to help lettuce farms in Yuma
grow more crops with less water during the peak growing season.
The research comes as drought threatens the Colorado
River, Arizona’s primary water source. Yuma County
supplies about 90% of the leafy greens Americans eat from
November through March. … [Assistant Professor Ali] Mohammed
found that pairing biostimulants with smart irrigation sensors
and organic farming techniques significantly boosted crop
yields. He estimates this combination could allow Yuma’s
organic farms to skip a few watering cycles during the growing
season, potentially saving 1 to 2 inches of water per
acre.
… Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the
predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite
water resources as if they were limitless. … Iran has
relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in
dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting
in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies.
… The country needs to start to decouple its economy
from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate
value and employment opportunities with minimal water
use. Agricultural water consumption can be reduced by
producing higher-value, less water-intensive crops, taking into
account food security, labor market and cultural
considerations.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has unveiled
preliminary flood maps for Butte County and the City of Chico,
highlighting revised flood hazards along various sources in the
region. These maps aim to assist building officials,
contractors and homeowners in making informed mitigation
decisions, fostering safer and more disaster-resilient
communities. Before the new Flood Insurance Rate Maps
(FIRMs) take effect, a 90-day appeal period will run from Dec.
3, 2025, to March 3, 2026. During this time, residents or
businesses with technical and scientific data, such as detailed
hydraulic or hydrologic information, can challenge the flood
risk details on the preliminary maps.
On November 19, 2025, the Klamath Tribes filed a motion to
amend their petition in the Circuit Court of Klamath County.
The amended petition seeks to reverse recent illegal orders
that replaced a long-time administrative law judge in the
Klamath Basin Adjudication (KBA) on the heels of a secret deal
cut between the Oregon State Office of Administrative Hearings
and certain water users in the Upper Klamath Basin.
… The KBA is a several-decades-old lawsuit pending in
the Circuit Court of Klamath County. It is quantifying the
federal reserved water rights of the Klamath Tribes in the
Klamath River Basin.
Many thousands of fall-run Chinook salmon migrated beneath the
Golden Gate Bridge into the upper Sacramento River to spawn
this fall. About 100 of the adult fish carried small tags that
signaled their location as they went. A monitoring network
tracked the fish, showing their progress online in real time as
part of a joint project by scientists at NOAA Fisheries and UC
Santa Cruz. They followed adult salmon through the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta into
Central Valley Rivers and their tributaries. … The
research is funded by California’s State Water Board to learn
more about how water temperatures influence the salmon that
support valuable commercial and recreational fisheries.
Deep in the heart of the Tijuana River Valley is a small
commune of growers who thrive despite being in an area that has
been described as “an environmental disaster.” The site is
known as the Tijuana River Valley Community Garden, which is
owned by the County of San Diego and managed by a private
contractor. … One concern is whether the food grown by
[grower Ed] Whited and the others is safe for consumption,
considering the amount of contamination in the area, especially
with the heavily-polluted Tijuana River next door. “Our worst
problem here is the flooding,” he said. “The river runs right
by here; if a plant is touched by water or potentially touched
by water, it’s no longer edible or considered edible and it’s a
complete loss.”
