In my neck of the woods, the mountains of western Colorado, spring arrived with a warning. After a historically low snowpack year and an unseasonably warm March, the Upper Gunnison Basin may have already seen its peak river flows nearly two months earlier than usual. By late April, most snow-monitoring sites had melted out, river flows were well below historic averages, and water managers were looking to the possibility of summer monsoons, not as a bonus, but as a lifeline.
That reality made the 2026 Next Generation Water Summit feel especially urgent. This year’s theme, “Increasing Demand, Declining Realities,” was a reflection of what communities across the Southwest are already experiencing in real time. Shrinking snowpack, earlier runoff, stressed reservoirs, prolonged drought, and growing demand are reshaping how we think about water, growth, infrastructure, conservation, and resilience.
At a time when the impacts of water scarcity are becoming visible in river basins, communities, farms, homes, and local economies, talking about water is no longer optional. It is one of the most important conversations we can have. The 2026 Next Generation Water Summit brought together policymakers, builders, water experts, conservation leaders, and community advocates to confront these realities head-on, and to explore the strategies needed to build a more water-resilient future.
The Colorado River provided the unavoidable backdrop for the Summit. Opening keynote speaker Brett Walton, a reporter for Circle of Blue, described it as the “hardest working river in the West,” but one that is no longer working the way its governing institutions once expected it to.
The problem is not new. The basin has spent decades attempting to manage a fundamental imbalance between the amount of water promised, the amount used, and the amount the river now reliably produces. Walton pointed back to 2022, when the Bureau of Reclamation called for basin-wide reductions of 2 million to 4 million acre-feet. In 2026, the system is again facing similarly daunting conditions, with decisions about post-2026 river operations, federal support, potential litigation, and the future of Lake Powell and Lake Mead still unresolved.
In her session, Anne Castle, former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior, gave attendees a deeper look at the legal and hydrological framework behind the crisis. The 1922 Colorado River Compact was negotiated during a period when officials believed the river carried more water than it has ultimately proven able to provide. The compact allocated 7.5 million acre-feet annually to the Upper Basin and 7.5 million acre-feet to the Lower Basin, while also allowing the Lower Basin an additional 1 million acre-feet. A later treaty committed 1.5 million acre-feet annually to Mexico.
Together, those commitments reflected assumptions based on a wetter river. Today’s river looks drastically different. A warmer climate, declining runoff efficiency, prolonged drought, and continued demand have exposed the limitations of those assumptions. And it’s not just a temporary dry spell. It is a structural problem that will require choices about who conserves, how much they conserve, who pays, and how risk is shared among states, cities, countries, tribes and agricultural producers.
Walton compared the danger of delaying those decisions to Cape Town’s approach toward “Day Zero,” when residents faced severe restrictions as reservoir levels approached crisis conditions. While Western cities are not guaranteed to experience the same outcome, the lesson is shown that waiting until a system reaches the edge leaves communities with fewer, harsher, and more expensive options.
“When it gets really dire, you have to make decisions,” Walton said. “The goal is not for it to get to this point.”
If uncertainty defined the Summit’s discussion of the Colorado River, data emerged as one of the most important tools for navigating it.
Sara Larsen of OpenET discussed how satellite-based evapotranspiration data can provide a clearer picture of how water moves from soil and vegetation into the atmosphere.
Evapotranspiration, commonly called ET, is a key component of the water cycle and an important measure of consumptive water use. Historically, it has been difficult to quantify consistently across large landscapes.
Remote sensing is changing that. OpenET makes field-scale ET information openly available, giving farmers, irrigation districts, watershed managers, and basin planners another tool for understanding crop water use, improving irrigation decisions, evaluating drought impacts, monitoring watershed health, and building more complete water budgets. Because the models and data are openly shared, they can also help establish a common set of information for conversations that are often contentious.
Better information does not make difficult decisions disappear, but it can make those decisions more transparent and defensible. Water managers cannot balance supply and demand if they do not understand both sides of the equation.
That same principle applies at the utility and household levels. Amit Sharma of Aquatrax demonstrated how artificial intelligence, advanced metering infrastructure, customer portals, and automated alerts can translate large amounts of utility data into information people can actually use.
Customers can monitor consumption, receive leak notifications, compare use against water budgets, and, in some cases, get forecasts that allow them to adjust their behavior before exceeding a future allocation.
Utilities, meanwhile, can use integrated data to identify water losses, understand consumption patterns, improve billing communication, and reach customers before a leak becomes a destructive or expensive event.
But technology alone is not enough. Sharma repeatedly returned to the challenge of customer participation: Data only saves water when it reaches people in a form that encourages them to act.
On the other hand, few topics illustrated the Summit’s theme more directly than the rapid growth of hyperscale data centers.
Data centers have powered internet searches, cloud storage, streaming, and digital services for years, but the scale and resource demands of newer facilities are dramatically different. Anjali Bean of Western Resource Advocates explained that hyperscale facilities can include enormous campuses and require vast amounts of electricity. Depending on their cooling systems, they may also place significant new demands on local water supplies.
Western Resource Advocates estimated that data center cooling could require at least 21,000 additional acre-feet of water annually across its seven-state region by 2035. Bean emphasized that this is an estimate, not a precise forecast, because public information about facility water consumption remains limited and individual facilities can vary significantly.
On-site cooling is only part of the equation. The electricity consumed by data centers can carry its own water footprint, depending on how that power is generated. In some cases, indirect water use associated with electricity production may exceed the water consumed at the data center itself.
The central question, therefore, is not simply whether communities should welcome or reject data centers. It is whether local governments and utilities have the information and policies needed to understand the tradeoffs before committing scarce resources.
The speakers encouraged communities to require transparent water-use reporting, evaluate each proposal individually, consider demand offsets, protect existing customers from infrastructure costs, and determine whether first-come, first-served allocation still makes sense when supplies are constrained. Some communities are developing data-center-specific ordinances, while others are adopting temporary moratoriums to give themselves time to understand the implications.
In an era of constrained supplies, economic development decisions are also water allocation decisions.
While basin negotiations and data centers command attention, many of the Summit’s most actionable strategies focused on the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure communities already have.
The proposed water annex to the Building Performance Institute’s BPI 1200 standard would provide a consistent framework for evaluating water use in existing homes. Residential water use represents only one portion of national demand, but that does not make it insignificant, particularly in communities where household use, outdoor irrigation, and leaks collectively place substantial pressure on local systems.
A home water assessment can identify inefficient fixtures, excessive irrigation, leaks, opportunities for hot-water savings, and other improvements. It can also help connect water efficiency with energy efficiency. Water generally requires energy to be pumped, treated, heated, and moved, while energy production frequently requires water. Improving one side of that relationship can reduce pressure on the other.
Greywater reuse offers another opportunity to turn a resource that is normally discarded into a dependable local supply. Laura Allen and Drew Elmore described greywater as water from sources such as showers, bathroom sinks, and washing machines that can be redirected for another use rather than immediately entering a sewer or septic system.
At the household level, a simple laundry-to-landscape system can irrigate trees and other plants with water residents already use. Because households produce greywater throughout the year, it can provide a measure of “drought insurance” for established landscapes during dry periods.
Greywater also changes the way people think about water. When laundry water flows toward a tree rather than disappearing down a drain, residents become more aware of the soaps and chemicals they use, the needs of their landscapes, and the possibility of treating water as a resource with multiple useful lives.
Denver’s program demonstrates how communities can move greywater from policy to practice by combining public education, installation support, workforce development, and simple entry points for residents. The newly formed Greywater Alliance aims to help other communities do the same by sharing resources, technical knowledge, policy guidance, and program models.
Technology, standards, and policy all depend on qualified people to implement them.
A panel on irrigation licensing and certification emphasized that outdoor water efficiency is no longer a matter of simply telling residents to water less. Effective landscape management now draws on water budgets, irrigation audits, weather and evapotranspiration data, smart controllers, soil health, plant selection, nonpotable water, and long-term system maintenance.
Kris Loomis noted that policies do not save water automatically. The people designing, installing, inspecting, and maintaining irrigation systems determine whether those policies deliver real results.
“The problem hasn’t historically been writing the regulations,” she said. “Getting 10,000 landscapes to implement it correctly is where the fun really begins.”
As Colorado considers a possible irrigation licensing structure, panelists stressed the importance of industry involvement, bilingual training materials, multiple pathways to qualification, recognition of prior experience, reasonable entry requirements, sustainable funding, and meaningful enforcement. The goal is not to create barriers for workers. It is to ensure that landscapes and irrigation systems perform as intended after the plans have been approved and the installation crews have left.
Santa Fe offered a local example of how governments can increase their impact without necessarily creating a long list of disconnected new programs.
Christine Chavez described how the city combined its Water Conservation Section, Sustainability, and Keep Santa Fe Beautiful initiative into a single Conservation and Sustainability Division. Previously, the programs operated in different departments despite serving similar audiences, working with many of the same partners, and addressing closely related issues.
The reorganization allows the programs to share staff, communications, educational efforts, technical expertise, and community partnerships. It also makes it easier to connect water conservation with energy, waste reduction, urban forestry, neighborhood engagement, and climate resilience.
Water should not be treated as an isolated issue. Planting a tree can affect shade, heat, irrigation demand, habitat, stormwater, and community well-being. Teaching a child about recycling can open a larger conversation about consumption and natural resources. Coordinating those messages can make each individual program more effective.
The result, Chavez said, is “greater impact without proportional growth,” as well as stronger organizational resilience and a better return on public investment.
One of the Summit’s most complex discussions addressed produced water—the highly saline water brought to the surface during oil and gas extraction.
New Mexico generated approximately 2.74 billion barrels of produced water in 2025, according to the presentation, equal to roughly 315 million gallons per day. Most came from the Permian Basin in southeastern New Mexico. Historically, much of this water has been reused within oil and gas operations or injected underground for disposal.
Researchers are now studying whether advanced treatment could make some produced water suitable for uses outside the oil field. The New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium is evaluating treatment technologies, identifying remaining contaminants and conducting toxicity testing to help regulators determine whether beneficial reuse can be accomplished without harming people or ecosystems.
Early pilot results presented at the Summit were described as promising, but the researchers were careful not to characterize the science as settled. Some treated samples approached drinking-water benchmarks for many measured constituents, and many toxicity tests showed no observed toxicity. However, not every constituent was removed in every test, pilot systems varied in their operation, and larger, longer-term demonstrations are still needed to establish reliability and consistency.
That caution matters. In a water-scarce region, the promise of a large new supply can be compelling. But scarcity cannot become a reason to move faster than the science. The produced-water discussion demonstrated what responsible innovation should look like: transparent testing, independent research, regulatory oversight, and a willingness to acknowledge what remains unknown.
For Sybil Sharvelle, the Summit’s conversations were also personal.
In her keynote, “One Woman, One Water, One Journey,” Sharvelle traced her career in water back to childhood experiences near Indiana’s Rocky Fork Lake and the Tippecanoe River. Indiana’s water challenges were different from those she would later encounter in the West. Water quantity was rarely the defining concern, but agricultural runoff and water quality were impossible to ignore.
Her story was a reminder that there is no single path into water work and no single water crisis. Some communities have too little water. Others struggle with flooding, pollution, failing infrastructure, or inequitable access. Many face several of these problems at once.
What connects them is the need for people who are willing to cross disciplinary boundaries, challenge established systems, communicate with communities, and remain committed through years of incremental progress.
The 2026 Next Generation Water Summit did not offer one technology, policy, or program capable of resolving every water challenge. That may have been its most honest conclusion.
The Colorado River cannot be stabilized through household conservation alone. New data cannot resolve political conflict by itself. Greywater systems, efficient irrigation, home audits, utility software, and institutional reorganization will not manufacture a missing snowpack. Even potentially transformative new supplies must be evaluated against public health, environmental, energy, affordability, and equity concerns.
But taken together, these strategies show what adaptation looks like.
It looks like understanding how much water is actually available and used. It looks like updating policies built around outdated assumptions. It looks like asking hard questions before approving new supply and demand. It looks like using water more than once, training people to implement conservation correctly and connecting programs that have historically worked in isolation. It also means recognizing that water decisions are never merely technical. They determine which communities grow, which landscapes survive, which industries thrive, and which risks are passed to future generations.
In western Colorado, the river is already delivering that message. The question is whether we are prepared to listen, and whether we can move quickly enough to build a future that reflects the realities now flowing downstream.
Click here to learn more about the annual Next Generation Water Summit.