Water LA

Activating Angelenos to capture, conserve, and reuse rainwater using nature-based solutions to mitigate flooding, recharge groundwater, and sequester greenhouse gasses. 

Los Angeles faces critical challenges to ensure water security and climate resilience. Extended seasonal dry periods and short wet periods have long characterized our Mediterranean climate, but climate change is creating more extreme conditions, leading to longer droughts, followed closely by ‘weather whiplash’ with intense storms and flooding. 

Los Angeles imports 60% of its water from snowmelt in northern California and Colorado. Statewide this practice consumes 19% of the state’s total electrical energy and 32% of its gas, creating significant greenhouse gas emissions. Further, our urban landscape has been designed to drain rainwater to the ocean as quickly as possible, preventing it from interacting with soil and vegetation or replenishing local groundwater stores. With depleted aquifers and climate models showing a future of less snow in the Sierra and Rocky Mountains, Los Angeles is ill-prepared for dwindling water availability in coming decades.   

Engineers have long focused on large grey infrastructure projects to meet our water supply needs and flooding challenges. However, we no longer have the luxury of relying on carbon-intensive projects that make inefficient use of our land and water resources, which are ill-suited for 21stcentury climate conditions. We must create a new normal that capitalizes on nature’s services to support a wide range of ecosystem functions from local and global perspectives, including flood management, greenhouse gas sequestration, urban cooling, habitat restoration, air purification, and water quality remediation.

The River Project, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit, developed the Water LA program to help Angelenos actively advance climate resilience.Water LA relies on nature-based solutions to simply and cost-effectively address multiple climate challenges. Strategies include replacing turf with healthy soils and native vegetation, rain gardens, parkway basins, rain tanks, greywater systems, permeable paving, and infiltration trenches. To date, the program has engaged residents in over 130 home retrofit projects throughout Los Angeles. 

Meeting the region’s flood safety, water conservation, water quality, and groundwater recharge goals will require a focused and rapid deployment to retrofit at least 1% of the County’s 1,686,000 single-family properties each year. Such a paradigm shift to parcel-scale climate adaptation won’t be possible without a coordinated regional effort to provide residents the education, resources, and materials they need to participate in transformation. Thus, The River Project is establishing a Collaborative partner network, creating a Water LA Training and Certification program, and developing a Web Tool to support homeowners in identifying site-specific, data-informed retrofit options. Using the Web Tool, residents will be able to create a graphic assessment of the rainfall on their property, and will receive guidance in selecting, sizing, and implementing a suite of simple strategies to capture and reuse water. 

Residential landscape retrofits are a game-changer for managing our land and water resources while simultaneously providing numerous environmental benefits. These retrofits can be carried out faster and more cost-effectively than large-scale infrastructure projects, and their decentralized nature will relieve the financial burden on local government of meeting stormwater goals. Tactical investments can transform residential properties into powerful sites of water management and increase coastal resilience.

Water LA is innovative because of its nature-based, parcel-scale approach informed by scientific research and watershed planning. With more than 60 percent of Los Angeles consisting of residential property, there is huge opportunity to transform the wider region through actively leveraging the aggregate value of small but effective interventions that reverse the negative impacts of current landscape practices. By establishing homeowner access to parcel-level environmental data, the Web Tool will educate and empower residents to be a part of this solution. Water LA can be adapted for any urban area struggling to manage water resources in a changing climate.

The Water LA Web Tool is a bi-lingual platform that leverages exiting spatial data in an accessible format, together with code helping homeowners to graphically assess their properties, and access available incentives. The tool will support residents in selecting, sizing, and implementing simple strategies based on GIS-informed opportunities and constraints such as climate zone, rainfall, infiltration rates, flood risk, tree canopy, and household water use. The tool will point residents to various combinations of appropriate retrofits to gamify hitting two key targets: 55 gallons per capita per day water use, and 100% of 2” storms managed or infiltrated on site.

Over the next 12 months, we are working in four disadvantaged and climate-vulnerable communities across LA County to assist residents in implementing retrofits, and will complete a detailed and graphic How-To Handbook. Concurrently, we will be working with partners on identifying a legal structure for the Collaborative and expanding the Collaborative network to include the local community-based organizations so crucial to building meaningful long-term capacity. Key goals are to grow a powerful constituency for the program through our collective social media platforms, and to identify funds to advance development of both the Web Tool and the Training and Certification curriculum.

Interest in adopting Water LA strategies is already outpacing current workforce capacity in nature-based solutions. Over the next three to five years, we intend to complete the curricula and coursework for Water LA Training and Certification program, providing a path for workers interested in developing expertise in the design, implementation and stewardship of regenerative climate solutions. The intent is to first pilot this program in local Community Colleges, working towards a statewide program over time. Additionally, we seek to secure ongoing Water LA program funding through the County’s proposed stormwater parcel tax, to support thousands more property retrofits each year.

Foremost among the Water LA team’s takeaways has been the need for sustained collaboration among and between the region’s environmental groups and local community-based organizations. We will continue to strengthen the Water LA Collaborative—non-profits capable of mobilizing their name recognition, social media presences, and educators to spread the word about nature-based strategies—and focus on building expertise and capacity among community-based partners whose local roots and agency are critical to establishing meaningful network integrity and longevity. As these practices spread, we can accelerate the rate of reaching the tipping point that can make regenerative practice the new normal.

Three dozen households were retrofit during our Water LA pilot, and hundreds more attended workshops. We are currently engaging four climate-vulnerable communities where we will reach thousands more. Residents we serve directly save money on water bills, experience less flooding, build resilience, and see enhanced property values. Our efforts have so far resulted in making curb cuts and permeable driveways legal, reduced setback and permitting requirements, and made greywater projects affordable and accessible. As we continue to work with agencies to streamline processes and make these strategies even easier to implement, we effectively impact millions of people across the region. 

We are currently engaging climate-vulnerable households in the unincorporated areas of Altadena, Florence-Firestone, West Whittier-Los Nietos, and West Puente Valley. Hundreds of participants will experience decreased flood risk, better air quality, and savings on their water bills. The standards and practices we advance will have impacts for over 10 million people across Los Angeles County. LA County has proposed a parcel-based stormwater tax, and we are advocating that a portion of tax revenues be dedicated to fund a program supporting future Water LA retrofits. If successful, it could help our Collaborative retrofit up to 1% of residential properties each year.

The River Project takes a holistic, watershed-based approach to water, land use and climate challenges. Our team possesses a wide range of skills in the areas of water and land use policy, planning, project installation, landscape design and management, education, and community engagement.  Our work centers more on practice than theory, and is always rooted in the communities we serve, making us uniquely positioned to grow Water LA. Our established working relationships with both LA City and County governments, and with Water LA Collaborative members, provide a stable foundation upon which to build the program.

The River Project is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, established in 2001 and supported largely by grants and contributions. While the Web Tool and curricula are not intended to generate revenue, we are interested in exploring a fee-for-service model as an adjunct to the Water LA Program. An excellent example of this has been successfully adopted by the Watershed Management Group (WMG) in Tucson. WMG has been using this structure with great success for the past six years, and we envision developing something similar here to amplify the program reach and help build capacity throughout the region.

Funding and technical support from the Solve community would enable advancement of the Water LA Web Tool, which will be vital for driving informed action. Ultimately, the tool will provide critical information and resources that are otherwise unavailable to many in this climate-vulnerable region—the second-largest urban area in the US. This will also allow users to submit their retrofit plan directly to agencies providing rebates, and incentives—making projects even more accessible. Solve’s experts could provide critical technical and UI/UE guidance in making the Web Tool a reality, thus empowering residents to foster climate resilience in their own communities.

Our team has identified barriers in local policy and building codes prohibitive to managing water on-site. Sustained engagement with agencies has resulted in updates to many of these policies and codes, but there is still work to be done. Solve’s assistance with Web Tool development would help to communicate important information about the value of nature-based solutions, strengthen Collaborative efforts to raise public awareness, and shape water policy in LA and beyond. Demonstrating that technology can be deployed in service to, rather than in lieu of nature-based solutions, can help bridge the divide between 20th and 21st century climate practitioners.