Make our Rivers Swimmable

Morocco's implementation of seawater desalination plants has successfully provided drinking water to 1.6 million people and enabled record agricultural exports for large-scale tomato producers, while simultaneously revealing the technology's limitations in addressing broader water needs due to high costs, geographic constraints, and environmental impacts that benefit only well-funded farms near coastal facilities.

A fishing cooperative at the San Ignacio Lagoon protects gray whales that use the lagoon as a nursery by not fishing at that time of the year. Instead, their income comes from ecotourism which brings people close to the whales during that season.

Replacing nonfunctional grass lawns that require excessive amounts of water with a mix of desert plants and a few plants that need more water can help save water and keep cities like Las Vegas cool.

Water harvesting is collecting free water, such as rain, stormwater, and greywater, to use and finding ways to make it linger longer into the dry season. This can include active strategies like collecting it in tanks or passive strategies like directing it towards rain gardens to water plants. Water harvesting can help prevent the depletion of lakes and rivers and save money.

Indonesian villagers were experiencing water shortages as natural springs started to dry up in part due to climate change, so they installed infiltration wells to collect and absorb rainwater. Not everyone, at first, wanted to implement the wells on their property, but by 2020, there were 320 infiltration wells in Patemon village. This water conservation project is not being implemented throughout the rest of the country.

As demand soars and climate change routinely throws cities into shortage crises, the availability of clean water is one of the most pressing challenges of the present and near future. Desalination has long been lambasted for being too expensive and polluting, but a new solar-powered prototype is putting forth a more sustainable, small-scale solution. Solar collectors boil water and then condense it separately from the brine and dirt so that it is drinkable.

Since 2014, the Billion Oyster Project has been working to restore oyster reefs to the New York coasts in an attempt to reduce pollution and bring back marine life. In partnership with restaurants and students throughout the city, the foundation and grant funded project is seeing the return of some oyster reefs and using artificial reefs to support more marine life.

Communities in Kathmandu are restoring centuries-old stone water spouts that now provide 2.4 million liters of clean drinking water daily to residents facing contaminated tap water and severe supply shortages. Some restored spouts have produced over 800,000 liters per day and served as community gathering spaces.

The SeaStore Seagrass Restoration Project in Kiel, Germany, is teaching locals to harvest and replant the underwater grasses. The project is restoring areas these plants used to inhabit because they store large amounts of carbon.

Cities in Peru are adopting a nature-based solution project in which they charge residents one Peruvian sol with their water bill each month to fund local watershed and rainforest conservation.