Ensuring Water Conservation and Efficiency Programs Are Accessible to All—In California and Beyond
Californians and others in the Western United States need to save water. This is true now amidst a historic megadrought, and it will continue to be true when this drought ends. But many water conservation and efficiency programs aren’t accessible to low-income households.
California non-functional turf irrigation ban provides businesses an opportunity to step up on sustainability
A new ban on non-functional turf irrigation in California—part of recently announced emergency drought regulations—provides a unique opportunity for California’s business community to demonstrate sustainability leadership through proactive drought response.
Presentation: The Untapped Potential of California’s Urban Water Supply
In this presentation, Pacific Institute experts provided a deep dive into the untapped potential of California's alternative water supplies: urban water efficiency, water reuse, and stormwater capture...
The U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: Water Components
On November 5, 2021, the U.S. Congress passed President Biden’s major infrastructure bill, HR 3684, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The President is expected to sign the bill into law.
Op-Ed: Does the Bay Area Have the Water It Needs to Grow?
It seems as though the two things the Bay Area has the least of are housing and water. The region has a shortfall of 699,000 housing units, which has driven housing costs to astronomical heights, and pushed 35,000 of our neighbors into temporary housing or onto the streets. Our colleagues at San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR),a public policy think tank, have found that the region needs to build an astonishing 2.2 million homes by 2070 to meet future demand and make up for the present shortfall.
Pacific Institute Launches Water Resilience Issue Brief, Calls on Decision-makers to Rapidly Scale Water Resilience Solutions in Build-Up to COP26
Never before have the global water and climate agendas been so closely linked. More than 30 years ago, the Pacific Institute made some of the earliest projections about how climate change would wreak havoc on the water cycle. Today, we see many of these impacts before our very eyes. Amid climate change, intensifying floods and droughts have affected people, nature, and economies.
Water Resilience
The world is facing a global water crisis marked by growing competition for freshwater resources, rapidly deteriorating water quality, poor and declining ecosystem health, unprecedented biodiversity loss, and a failure to meet basic water and sanitation needs.
Water for a Growing Bay Area: How the Region Can Grow Without Increasing Water Demand
The San Francisco Bay Area is projected to add two million jobs by 2070, attracting millions more people. To prevent housing from becoming even more unaffordable, the region needs to build 2.2 million new housing units.
The Impacts of the Pandemic Remain for Small Water Systems and Customers In-Debt
In the U.S., the vital responsibility of continuing safe water supply during the pandemic is decentralized, spread among nearly 50,000 community water systems. More than 45,000 of these are small community water systems (SCWS), serving fewer than 10,000 people each. Together, SCWS provide water to more than 53 million people — 18 percent of the national population — across urban and rural areas, on tribal reservations, in the midst of larger utilities in huge metropolises, and in growing communities.
Customer Debt and Declining Revenues: The Financial Impacts of COVID-19 on Small Community Water Systems
More than 45,000 small community water systems exist in the United States. These small community water systems, defined as those serving fewer than 10,000 people, are distributed across the country. Altogether they serve 53 million people across rural and urban settings, on Tribal reservations, in the midst of huge metropolises, and in growing communities.
