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.
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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! Registration will be opening soon for two
exciting Water Education Foundation events this fall.
Water Summit | Oct. 29
Join us for our premier event of
the year, bringing together leading policymakers and experts from
all sectors to discuss the most pressing water issues facing
California and the West.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado
River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated
between the seven states that depend on the river. Those
guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding
negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against
the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend
on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two
federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of
unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15
percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities
scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for
shortages.
In an effort to address the historic-low water level at Lake
Mead, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Tuesday approved an agreement with the federal government to
help add water to the reservoir. On Tuesday, Metropolitan’s
Board of Directors approved an agreement with the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation, which will provide the agency up to $65
million to keep up to 200,000 acre-feet of its Colorado River
supplies in the lake this year. … The board
also approved two other agreements with the Quechan Tribe and
Bard Water District, allowing the federal government to fund
the addition of up to 19,000 acre-feet of conserved
agricultural water to Lake Mead annually in 2027 and 2028.
As artificial intelligence fuels a new wave of data center
development across California, lawmakers are grappling with how
to support the growing industry while protecting the
state’s limited water supplies. Two bills moving
through the Legislature would give state and local officials
a more complete picture of data centers’ water
demands. AB 2469 would require developers to disclose
projected water use before local governments approve new
facilities, while AB 2619 would require operators to report
actual water use annually once the facilities open.
… Following the Bureau of Reclamation’s release of its formal
Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the post-2026
operational guidelines, the state [Ariz.] is locked in a
strict era of limits. Under federal fallback models analyzed in
the EIS, Arizona faces structural water cuts that could gut its
Central Arizona Project allocation by as much as 77 percent.
Because Arizona holds the most junior water rights on the river
system, it must take the brunt of the reductions
first. The resulting crisis is fundamentally shifting the
state’s economy, forcing a direct collision between traditional
legacy industries and a booming tech sector, while engineering
a historic transfer of socio-political power back to Native
American tribes.
A massive and much-anticipated housing development tied up in
litigation could potentially be back on again in a small town
that borders the Central Valley and Bay Area. The question
remains, however: Will there be enough water for it and
the surging population nearby? … In 2024,
local water agencies adopted the Delta-Mendota Subbasin
Groundwater Sustainability Plan, which included Patterson.
… [T]he city of Patterson decided to single out the
Keystone Ranch development and attempted to impose the cost of
building a groundwater recharge facility on
the development, then later denied the project wholesale on
April 1, 2025. The California Department of Housing and
Community Development, or HCD, found that the city’s review of
the project is inconsistent with the state housing agencies.
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.
No portion of the West has been immune to drought during the last
century and it occurs with much greater frequency in the West
than in any other region of the country.
