WATERSHEDS

CLEAN WATER FOR PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE

Healthy Bay Area watersheds are fundamental to safeguarding California’s limited water resources, now under increasing strain from development and climate change. These lands filter a portion of the region’s water supply, and some feed into the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta—a source of drinking water for 24 million Californians. Conserving and managing these lands will help to ensure adequate supplies of clean water for people and wildlife. Bay Area watersheds provide many benefits:

Clean Drinking Water
These lands catch and filter rainwater and replenish groundwater supplies.

Reduced Costs
Functioning watersheds reduce the need for costly infrastructure by storing water and naturally filtering polluted runoff.

Wildlife and Fisheries
Watershed lands provide habitat for threatened and endangered species and protect the aquatic ecosystems that sustain fisheries.

The benefits of our watersheds are unique, and these ecosystems cannot be replaced: manmade infrastructure is at best an expensive and incomplete substitute. As part of ensuring California’s long-term prosperity, we must protect, restore, and carefully manage the Bay Area’s vast network of watershed lands.

Healthy Watersheds Reduce Flooding

Soil and plants in protected watershed lands act like a sponge, naturally limiting flood danger by absorbing and slowly releasing storm water. Paved surfaces lack this capacity—water flows over them, unabsorbed, at much greater volume and speed, breaching barriers and overwhelming drainage systems.

Paving even 10% of a landscape can cause serious problems. Keeping wtershed lands unpaved and healthy reduces the need for expensive flood-prevention engineering as well as the costs of repairing flood damage—and limits threats to human life.