November 11, 2024
This article appeared in
River Partners’ 2024 Impact Report: Confluence
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Driving down the I-5 corridor from Redding to Bakersfield in the summer, you might feel like you’re crossing a dry desert rather than a Mediterranean paradise.
Now, imagine this landscape as a thriving, water-rich region with networks of rivers, streams, floodplains, and wetlands. This isn’t fantasy, but a glimpse of California’s past, and a future we can recreate for native habitat, towns, and farmland. This necessary transformation is supported by state leaders for a new vision of water management in California. The key lies in reconnecting California rivers with their lost natural water infrastructure like floodplains, marshes, and groundwater aquifers.
“As things change, we can’t just build more dams…we already have plenty of those. With increasing hydroclimate variability, the kinds of interventions we need are things like floodplain restoration and groundwater banking,” says Dr. Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
The water storage capacity beneath our feet is dollar-for-drop the cheapest and fastest storage development we can deliver for our state. There’s up to 10 times more water storage underground than in all of California’s major reservoirs combined.
Julie Rentner, River Partners President
River Partners is spearheading a unique new public-private partnership with support from nonprofit leads that include the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, California Water Action Collaborative, and California Water Resilience Initiative, as well as global brands like Proctor & Gamble, Apple, Chipotle, Google, Amazon, Pentair, and others.
Together, we are inviting private partners to join public agencies in delivering a suite of transformative projects in the Sacramento River basin and San Joaquin Valley. Our work of water replenishment projects is the first of its kind to leverage private investment in large-scale riverway restoration in California.
With projects implemented from 2024 through 2030, this work will replenish and repurpose critical freshwater resources, benefit endangered native salmon and other imperiled wildlife, and deliver measurable improvements in flood safety, carbon capture, and groundwater replenishment to boost California’s climate resiliency.
Notably, in 2024 we launched a Sacramento basin companion to our flagship Dos Rios Ranch project in the San Joaquin Valley, pairing investment from Apple with support from state and federal agencies to restore and reconnect 1,600 acres of natural floodplains at the confluence of the Feather River, Sacramento River, and Butte Creek. It’s the largest river confluence in the entire Central Valley. The project, Dos Rios Norte, will convert farmland back to native habitat, reducing water demand and encouraging flooding to recharge underground aquifers.
Following restoration, the water rights associated with the property, some of the oldest in California, will be dedicated for streamflow enhancement to benefit imperiled fish and wildlife like Chinook salmon. Dos Rios Norte restoration planning is now underway in partnership with the Traditional Ecological Knowledge department of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.
In addition to delivering water conservation and replenishment projects, we’re also advancing planning and research for a new water reality. River Partners and a coalition of science partners from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Stanford University, and CSU, Stanislaus are at the forefront of groundbreaking research looking to nature—and our rivers—to support recharging underground aquifers across California. Our joint groundwater research study will advance our understanding of how floodwaters can support groundwater storage on restored floodplains.
People now realize what huge mistakes were made in the last 100 years. We’re trying to understand how nature works so we can move forward in a way that’s nature-centric.
Dr. Rosemary Knight, Geophysics Department Professor at Stanford University
These important partnerships address our critical window of opportunity this decade to restore ecological health to important riverside lands statewide. By restoring rivers and floodplains, we rejuvenate natural water storage during wet years for use during dry times. We also reduce long-term irrigation demand by transitioning farmland into native habitat.
“At River Partners, we go beyond restoration to reimagine how we manage water in California for ecosystems, communities, and the state’s economy,” says River Partners President Julie Rentner. “We’re fixing the things that went wrong. We’re fixing the things that drive drought emergencies, and we’re creating places for wildlife and parks for people in the process.”
