our vision

Safe, resilient, and affordable water systems.

The Bay Area One Water Network advances safe and resilient urban water systems in the San Francisco Bay Area. It serves as a common forum for interaction across organizational, political, and jurisdictional boundaries to advance holistic water stewardship through collaborative planning, joint fact-finding, and capacity building.

Climate change poses major challenges to the Bay Area’s water supplies. Less snowpack, more erratic precipitation, and rising seas expose the vulnerabilities of our current water infrastructure systems. The Bay Area One Water Network helps innovate solutions to these challenges by bringing together diverse regional stakeholders from water supply and wastewater agencies, stormwater groups, regulatory agencies, city and regional planning groups, businesses, universities, research organizations, community-based organizations and environmental advocacy groups. Through focused workshop discussions and synthesis reports, we aim to provide decision-makers with the contextual information, tools, and research roadmaps that can support the development of 21st century water infrastructure.

In 2019, the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Reinventing Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt)—a consortium of universities that was led by researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley—engaged with local utilities, engineers and regulators to establish the Bay Area One Water Network. After the ReNUWIt project ended in 2022, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership took the lead in convening the Bay Area One Water Network.

In 2019, the Bay Area One Water Network held two in-person workshops: one focused on stormwater capture and use, and the other on water recycling. The workshops were designed to identify regional challenges and opportunities, to identify synergies among existing efforts, and to strengthen working relationships among the participants. We published two reports that documented the discussions and conclusions from each of the workshops: “Stormwater Capture to Augment Water Supplies in the San Francisco Bay Area: Challenges, Opportunities, and Next Steps” and “Advancing Water Reuse in the San Francisco Bay Area : Integrating Water Reuse into A Regional Approach to Water Management”. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, we pivoted to an online format and held free, publicly accessible webinars reporting out on the 2019 workshops and reports to broaden their reach among practitioners. We also held an online webinar about next steps for the Bay Area One Water Network, which provided foundational information on potential workshop opportunities that would be particularly relevant in the Bay Area going forward.

In 2021, we collaborated with the San Francisco Estuary Partnership to host a roundtable discussion on nature-based solutions for shoreline resilience. The workshop identified key next steps for advancing nature-based solutions that could provide multiple benefits for water quality, wildlife habitat and shoreline access, and climate resilience and resulted in a report, “Nature-Based Solutions for Coastal Resilience, Habitat Enhancement, and Water Quality Improvement.”

In 2022, we held a workshop on advancing water conservation while improving water affordability in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 2023 we held a workshop to explore potential opportunities for and barriers to brackish water desalination in the Bay Area, with a focus on intersections of healthy ecosystems and disposal of reverse osmosis concentrate. These workshops resulted in two reports, “Paths for Equitably Advancing Water Conservation in the San Francisco Bay Area” and “Unlocking Water Resources in the Bay Area with Advanced Water Treatment Technologies.”

In September 2025, we held a convening to develop a strategic roadmap for the One Water Network. Stay tuned for details!