During 2021, the debilitating impacts of the global water crisis, exacerbated by climate change, made bold headlines—with risks to people, nature, and economies. For the Pacific Institute, 2021 was one of the boldest years yet to provide solutions to the world's most pressing water challenges.
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.
Today’s announcement of the White House Action Plan on Global Water Security is a step in the right direction for building water resilience both in the United States and around the world.
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...
Throughout California, innovative urban water strategies—water efficiency, water reuse, and stormwater capture—are already finding success in many communities. These cost-effective and technologically feasible strategies reduce urban water use (currently 6.6 million acre-feet per year), while boosting local water supplies...
Persistent challenges and severe drought have shone a spotlight on the vulnerability of California’s water systems. They also offer an opportunity to rethink the state’s water supplies and strategies for the 21st century and beyond.
April 1st marks the end of the wet season in California. It’s also the day the California Department of Water Resources announces key seasonal snowpack measurements and makes projections of water availability for the rest of the water year. Today, the news is extremely bad and is a call to action to do much more — and to do some things much differently.
Around the world, people and nature rely on groundwater for survival. The newly released United Nations World Water Development Report 2022 underscores humanity’s reliance on this resource, noting groundwater currently provides about half the volume of domestic water and a quarter the volume of irrigation water withdrawn globally.
In the past few years, severe droughts in India and Iran have led to a big increase in conflicts over access to irrigation and domestic water and to demonstrations against water diversions from one community to another.
In November, amid the deepening drought, the DWR and the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) issued joint recommendations to the California State Legislature for new indoor residential water use standards, along with a study supporting the recommendations (hereafter the Indoor Residential Water Use Study, or IRWUS).