The once mighty Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Runoff traveling down the Mississippi has caused a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico. Californians are trucking water to their homes.

Every community, our entire economy, and all wildlife rely on healthy and abundant freshwater. Yet we have failed to treat it as an invaluable, finite resource.

None of us have done right by our waterways. It’s time for all of us to change it.  

The Freshwater Trust is setting forth a plan to retool the way we manage water and invest in conservation. We’re calling for a new era – one that doesn’t just admire the problem but brings to bear the solutions afforded by the 21st century.

It’s about providing clarity to the issues and using new tools and technologies to address them with precision and efficiency. It’s about ensuring investments made in restoring and protecting our rivers are returned with measurable outcomes.

These sentiments of collaboration, transparency and results can be summarized in four specific campaign components.

If you are with us on these, add your name and help us blaze a new path forward – one where conservationists, producers, businesses, municipalities and legislators,  stand together for solutions and a sustainable freshwater future for all.

We believe: 

• Conservation should be using available data and 21st century tools and technology to identify, prioritize, and address today’s water quality issues more strategically and effectively.
• America needs a Federal Water Infrastructure Spending Plan that prioritizes investment in managing our existing water resources. That means measuring how much water we have and how much we use so we can sustainably manage it and incentivizing partnerships between upstream and downstream water users.
• Every public dollar spent on restoration should yield a full dollar's worth of results. Right now, $38 billion dollars of taxpayer money is spent every year on freshwater conservation and restoration, and we are certainly not getting $38 billion worth of results.
• All states should address groundwater as well as surface water management in a way that ensures water can be used where it's needed without negatively impacting nearby ecosystems and communities.