Quest to save groundwater aims at love for lush, green lawns

A greenhouse that is cooled by seawater and the wind is allowing farmers in Somaliland to grow crops like tomatoes and vegetables despite extreme heat. By creating an environment that is higher in humidity and cooler in temperature, plants don’t need to drink as much water — almost 10 times less water because of the cooling system. There are challenges to scaling the response, but these greenhouses offer farmers the potential to increase their revenue in Africa.

Tucson has slashed its per capita water consumption by more than a third, and one of the more startling ways it's done that is by reusing water after it's flushed down the toilet or run through a washing machine.

Saving money while conserving water and electricity is a win-win for the textile industry in Bangladesh. After a joint effort to improve the mechanics and upgrade the factories, the industry saw a savings of 1.2 million cubic meters of water, 16 million cubic meters of gas and 10 million kilowatt hours of electricity.

An AI-powered underwater sensor system developed by KMFRI and ShoShin Innovation Hub detects dangerous drops in dissolved oxygen in Lake Victoria and sends SMS alerts to fish farmers. This enabled them to move their cages in time and successfully averting a mass fish kill in February 2026 that would have threatened hundreds of tilapia cages at Dunga Beach.

Nevada launched a $25 million pilot program in 2023 that pays farmers to voluntarily retire groundwater rights in over-pumped basins. The state-funded buyback purchases water rights at competitive rates and retires them to reduce unsustainable groundwater extraction, with the help of local organizations like the Walker Basin Conservancy. Since forming, the program retired approximately 22,500 acre-feet of groundwater rights, and the program's success led to unanimous bipartisan legislation to expand it.

The Regreening Sudbury Project transformed a lunar-like wasteland into thriving forest through decades of systematic tree planting (10+ million trees), soil amendments, and transparent open-data tracking. This resulted in a 98% reduction in air pollution and 50% recovery of fish populations while creating a replicable model for ecological restoration.

To conserve water and save on costs, the L&T South City Apartment complex in Bengaluru retrofitted more than 1,600 apartments to swap freshwater for treated wastewater from a Sewage Treatment Plant for flushing toilets. In doing so, the complex has been able to reduce the number of freshwater tankers needed to support the buildings by about 10 percent.

Farmers in Oklahoma adopted the practice of fencing cattle away from streams and providing alternative clean water sources, dramatically improving water quality, restoring local wildlife, and enhancing veterinary outcomes and productivity for local ranchers.

Several pilot studies point to the viability of desalination projects being an effective option for farmers in certain fresh-water-scarce regions.

Utah is ditching the “use it or lose it” water rights doctrine to encourage farmers to conserve water amid severe water shortages. Instead, it’s encouraging farmers to use less water while allowing them to keep their rights to it. The government is awarding funding for efficiency upgrades and creating a system for farmess to lease out the saved water.