Sacramento & San Joaquin River Basins

About

In Northern California, a network of rivers formed in the forested Sierra Nevada mountains converges southwest of the city of Sacramento, flows through the fertile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, and drains through the largest estuary on the U.S. west coast into the San Francisco Bay. This region supports California’s largest drinking water supply, numerous at-risk communities, and highly productive but drought- and flood-prone agricultural areas. In recent years, catastrophic wildfires, droughts, and floods have led to major property damage and loss of life.  

The Freshwater Trust (TFT) and its partners are implementing a regional approach that funds and implements natural infrastructure projects that reduce climate risks and provide resilience to communities and ecosystems.

TFT began working with Sacramento Area Sewer District (SacSewer) in 2017 to develop and fund a regional groundwater recharge and habitat restoration program. In 2018, SacSewer received a $300-million state award to begin implementing a $650-million project that will deliver 50,000 acre-feet (16 billion gallons) of recycled water to offset groundwater pumping by agricultural irrigators and help preserve sensitive habitats for Sandhill cranes and other special-status species. This program, known as Harvest Water, is the first of its kind in California, and the only project to thus far receive funding from the 2014 California bond.  

TFT has also been working with partners to identify high-impact managed aquifer recharge (MAR) projects. To help drive this work to scale, TFT helped form and now manages the North Delta Groundwater Sustainability Agency (NDGSA)—a joint powers authority of multiple local stakeholders—and has partnered with a water district to implement one of the State’s first agricultural MAR projects. This project uses corporate funds secured by TFT to deliver excess flood water from the Cosumnes River to adjacent vineyards, thereby recharging groundwater and helping to reduce flood risk. In the Sacramento River, we have partnered with local landowners to keep more water instream, improving outcomes for native fish and wildlife. Lastly, we continue to support groundwater management efforts in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, helping to ensure that these resources are sustainable for future generations.

Building on all this work in the lower watershed, we have expanded our work upstream to develop and pilot a "Sierra to Sea" Watershed Outcomes Bank. The Bank integrates funding and implementation efforts from the headwaters down to the ocean, securing, leveraging and driving funding to the most effective portfolio of drought, flood, fire, and habitat projects to cost-effectively solve multiple challenges across a 2.5-million-acre swath of multiple jurisdictions. We have built this framework to drive efficiencies, help partners integrate and scale up otherwise fragmented efforts, and to create a “magnet” for big chunks of funding to gravitate toward. And it's already working, with new funding secured for projects to assess levee overtopping risk, remove a low head dam, improve riparian habitat for special-status species, and the development of several coordinated forest health improvement projects. With projects quantified in multiple environmental currencies, it’s now possible to deliver regionally connected, cost-effective, and high-leveraged results at speed and scale.