For a century, California and the West have grappled with the job of storing water. The first half of the 20th century was the heyday of western dams; now many of them are aging; they were designed for the needs and values of another era. Is California “dammed out?” Or could increasing reservoir capacity help the state ride out the new era of aridification?

MIT’s Water Innovation Prize helps translate water-related research and ideas into businesses and impact. Each year, student-led finalist teams pitch their innovations to students, faculty, investors, and people working in various water-related industries.

The UK’s vast network of over 525,000km of sewers is notoriously expensive to maintain. A new AI tool is set to improve the efficiency of surveying sewerage systems and has the potential to benefit the entire water industry.

The Rio Grande flows nearly 2,000 miles from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. It is the primary source of water for more than 13 million agricultural, municipal and industrial water users in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. A new study finds that peak runoff on the Rio Grande could arrive earlier in the season, negatively impacting a watershed where demand already exceeds supply.

California’s Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative is a multi-billion dollar effort that encourages different water utilities and irrigation districts to work together to build shared infrastructure to reduce the effects of droughts, but a number of questions remain regarding how best to structure these agreements.

From the Euphrates to the Mekong, dams that ensure one country’s water supply risk leaving others parched. But shared water resources can be a source of peace as well as conflict.

Lakes serve as a major global source of freshwater. As temperatures continue to get warmer, so will lakes. As global average temperatures rise, lake evaporation is projected to increase at double the rate of ocean evaporation. However, future increases in lake evaporation vary substantially across regions.

An estimated 370,000 Californians rely on drinking water that may contain high levels of the chemicals arsenic, nitrate or hexavalent chromium. Researchers say that Californians impacted by unsafe drinking water from other compounds for which data are not as widely available.

California is preparing for a third straight year of drought, and officials are tightening limits on water use to levels never seen so early in the water year. Especially worrying is the outlook for the Sierra Nevada, the long mountain chain that runs through the eastern part of the state. California’s cities and its farms – which grow over a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruit and nuts – rely on runoff from the mountains’ snowpack for water.