Policy & Finance
Policy & Financial Tools to Make Conservation Work
For more than a decade, The Freshwater Trust has worked with agricultural partners, cities, utilities, local businesses, and agencies to design, fund, and implement prioritized conservation solutions that deliver the biggest impact for the least cost. We have tested this innovative approach across multiple watersheds, unlocking more than $1 billion in conservation funding. We are proud of this progress, but we have also seen firsthand the structural barriers to replicating and accelerating this approach. Given the urgency of our water challenges, we’re laser focused on structural reforms that add new tools, cut through red tape, save time, and result in better outcomes.
To overcome these challenges, we must implement an approach that quickly and efficiently connects all types of funding to the best projects across a region. Because no one is currently responsible for putting together the pieces to solve this complicated multi-sided problem, we have developed the “watershed outcomes bank” model.
Whether we’re talking with lawmakers, agency decision-makers, utilities, water users, farmers, or private sector businesses, our goal is to make it easier to do the business of conservation. The Freshwater Trust tirelessly advocates for data-driven solutions, coordinated funding, and getting money to good projects fast.
Here are some of the ways we’re doing this right now:
- Watershed Results Act: TFT has been working closely with Senator Wyden and partners on the Watershed Results Act, which would establish five "watershed outcome" pilots that use analytics to prioritize investment, build a leveraged stack of funds, and deploy via performance-based contracts. For more, please see Senator Wyden’s press release and read TFT’s 2022 and 2023 testimony on the bill before the Senate.
- Nutrient Funding Discussion Group: TFT co-led a discussion group with EPA HQ and industry leaders to help align EPA’s regulatory, funding, and financing tools around watershed solutions that use analytics to prioritize investment, leveraged together funds, and deliver funding quickly to agricultural partners. This work resulted in a draft action plan with multiple parts already getting implemented.
- RCPP amendments: TFT is working with a coalition of partners to help improve the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) in the Farm Bill so that it is much easier to use analytics to target investment to the best projects, then deliver USDA conservation funding to producers quickly and easily. Right now, too many hurdles stand in the way. We think that looks a lot like what we’re doing with Oregon NRCS right now.
- In addition to these policy efforts, TFT is actively putting these pieces together in the Snake River (ID/OR) and Sacramento River watersheds (CA), thanks to generous support from EPA Region 10, the Innovative Financing for National Forests program.
- For more detail on each of these initiatives, please review TFT’s March 2025 publication in The Water Report:
- Page 1: Smarter, Faster, More Efficient Working Lands Investment
- Page 3: The Watershed Outcomes Bank
- Page 5: Snake River: Watershed Outcomes Bank Case Study
- Page 11: California Pilot: “Sierra to Sea” Watershed Outcomes Bank
- Page 15: What Comes Next? Structural Policy Changes
In short, The Freshwater Trust is working to make it easier for major funders to integrate, prioritize, and deliver investments together at the watershed scale because no single entity can do it alone.
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