Leveraging Watersheds for Sustainable Natural Resource Management
From headwaters to outflow — aligning human and natural systems through Proposition 4 funding and collaborative watershed-scale action.
Why We're Here
The Challenge
California continues to grapple with how to align human systems with natural systems. We have made progress on specific, discrete challenges — but in doing so, we may be missing powerful system-level synergies that could help us all go farther, faster.
Today's Focus
We'll explore how Proposition 4 funding can help us identify and leverage those synergies — accelerating our collective path toward healthy, resilient, equitable watersheds across California.
The opportunity is not just to fund more projects — it's to build the cross-sector coordination infrastructure that makes watershed-scale action possible.
What Is a Watershed?
TECHNICAL DEFINITION
Setting Boundaries
USGS: A watershed is the land that drains rainfall and streams to a common outlet — a reservoir outflow, bay mouth, or point on a channel.
NOAA: A land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to streams, rivers, reservoirs, bays, and ultimately the ocean.
PRACTICAL DEFINITION
Informing Management
What WSN Means by "Watershed Health"
Ecosystem Health
Functioning forests, wetlands, rivers, and nearshore environments that sustain biodiversity and ecological services across the full watershed continuum.
Community Health
Public health, safety, and equity for all communities — including safe drinking water, flood protection, and economic viability — especially for the most vulnerable.
Climate Resilience
Watersheds that adapt under extreme uncertainty — absorbing and recovering from floods, droughts, wildfire, and other climate-driven disruptions.
Key Insight: Forest health + ecosystem health + community health = watershed health — not competing categories. A healthy watershed is the integration of all three.
Why Watershed Scale Matters
The Cost of Silos
Institutional "silos" separate deeply interdependent systems — slowing action, embedding inequities, and leaving resources stranded across jurisdictional boundaries.
The Watershed Advantage
Working at watershed scale illuminates new opportunities, efficiencies, and synergies that are invisible when we manage by sector or jurisdiction alone.
The Foundation
Trust + Shared Understanding
Trust and shared understanding are not soft outcomes — they are initial conditions that increase adaptive capacity and enable action under extreme uncertainty.
The soft things are the hardest to do.
- Kamyar Guivetchi
The Watershed Framework
A perpetual set of activities designed to build durable, watershed-wide networks, common understanding, and coordinated action across sectors and jurisdictions.
Build Networks
Cross-sector relationship building across land, water, and community stakeholders at watershed scale.
Develop Common Understanding
Shared knowledge of watershed function, risks, vulnerable communities, and data gaps.
Identify Opportunities
Surface synergies and aligned priorities that benefit from coordinated, multi-sector action.
Coordinate Action
Move from planning to implementation with aligned financing, governance, and adaptive management.
Learning Together
Monitor the impacts of your coordinated actions, internalize learning, and continue coordinating action.
Watershed Framework Principles
Urgency & Adaptability
Time is of the essence. Nimble, flexible, and timely action is paramount. Waiting for perfect conditions is not an option.
Interconnected Action
Coordinated action across a watershed produces more powerful human interventions than siloed efforts ever can.
Trust & Equity
Trust is foundational. Equity is essential — and better accomplished by reconnecting communities across the full watershed.
Water Affordability
Water must be affordable to everyone for basic human needs — a non-negotiable equity and public health commitment.
Collaboration & Stewardship
Collaboration reduces redundancies and conflict. Everyone has a role — every community member is a land and water steward.
Catalyze Good Things
A shift toward catalyzing good outcomes — rather than only preventing bad ones — must be grounded in transparency and accountability.
Opportunities at Watershed Scale
1
Flood ↔ Groundwater ↔ Ecosystems
Flood-MAR and FIRO-MAR require basin-wide coordination across reservoirs, floodplains, recharge areas, water rights, and operations — impossible to optimize at the project level alone.
2
Salmon Recovery
Salmon inhabit the headwaters into the ocean. How we live, farm, manage our forests and wetlands, and waterways all matter. Salmon inhabit systems and healthy systems support healthy salmon.
3
Forest & Headwaters Restoration
Upper watershed restoration can make forested communities safer and urban communities more water secure, improve habitat, mitigate downstream flooding, coordinate valley recharge, and may offer cheaper means to improve water quality.
4
Coordinating Surface Water and Groundwater
Surface water and groundwater are part of a single interconnected system. Opportunities abound to achieve better coordinated co-management.
5
Water Quality & Public Health Equity
Treating water at delivery to communities is one way to improve public health that can stick communities with the bill for unhealthy watersheds. Affordability is a concern everywhere. A watershed/systems approach asks where there may be upstream opportunities.
6
Permitting & Pace of Implementation
Coordination capacity is a prerequisite to moving faster. Fragmented permitting and planning slow implementation across all program areas. Outcomes focused systemic approaches could reduce redundancy.
Watershed Opportunities in Prop 4
1
Aligning Across Programs
2
Enabling Language — Section 90620
"Funds allocated pursuant to this division may be used by the Natural Resources Agency and its departments, board, and conservancies, to collaboratively fund projects at a landscape or multi-jurisdictional scale to provide multiple benefits."
Proposition 4: What is at stake
Proposition 4 represents a generational investment in California's water, ecosystems, and community resilience. The question is: how do we deploy it in a way that builds watershed-scale capacity — not just a new round of disconnected projects?
$10B
Total Bond Funding
California's landmark climate and water resilience bond, approved by voters in November 2024.
6
Priority Funding Areas
Safe drinking water, wildfire, drought, sea level rise, extreme heat, and biodiversity — all intersect at the watershed scale.
1
Strategic Opportunity
Prop 4 can fund projects or it can fund systems that get us to scale and help us catch up to the pace of climate change.
The Core Question: How can this investment be structured to support and enable cross-sector watershed-wide networks to collaborate and coordinate action that leverages system synergies and carries the work forward when these bond dollars are gone?