Freshwater Conservation

Help Protect the World's Fresh Water! With your help, we can work to protect fresh water around the world.

Freshwater Conservation

 

What's New:

Proposed 2011 Budget is Step Forward for Conservation
Proposal recognizes that the health of our economy and the health of our environment are fundamentally linked.

The Heartbeat of a River
Healthy rivers are ever-changing, rising and falling as seasons come and go. Seasonal flow patterns are a river's heartbeat—they orchestrate plant and animal life cycles ans sustain complex natural processes.

Water Policies Suffer Sinking Feeling
Writing for the BBC, Global Freshwater Program Director Brian Richter explains why there is an urgent need for the world to embrace new ways in which it uses water.

How We Protect Watersheds

How We Protect Watersheds

Explore a cool interactive feature to see how the Conservancy protects freshwater resources worldwide.

We know we need clean drinking water in order to live. But rivers and lakes – freshwater ecosystems – provide much more. They water our crops, give us fish to eat, power our factories and light our homes, carry goods to market and people back home, and bring us joy.

Yet every day we waste and spoil a staggering amount of the water nature gives us. Experts warn that within the next 20 years more than half the world’s population could face water shortages. It doesn’t have to be this way.

There are practical solutions – and new ones are being forged – that can help us work together to strike a balance between meeting our needs today and preserving nature’s ability to continue meeting our needs in the future but we must take bold action now.

Taking Action

Drawing on fifty years of on-the-ground experience, the Conservancy is engaged at 600 water sites in 30 countries, employing rigorous science, business savvy and an unwavering commitment to collaboration – because that’s what works. We are focusing on strategies that align with our greatest strengths and that hold the most promise for large-scale, enduring success:

  • Protecting land to protect clean water. By preserving the health of land around rivers and lakes – the watershed – we can keep pollution out of our water. Solution in action.
     
  • Keeping rivers flowing in healthy ways. We can preserve the benefits that rivers give us by preserving the patterns of high and low flow that orchestrate life in and along rivers. Solution in action.
     
  • Averting water scarcity by reducing waste. We can dramatically reduce water waste by giving large users – businesses, farms and cities – tools to use water more wisely.
    Solution in action.
     

Read more about our conservation solutions:

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Bridget Besaw (Colombian fisherman); Photo © Water.org (girl drinking water, India).