The drought in Arizona is causing businesses and residents alike to carefully evaluate their water use. And the City of Mesa is no different. With a goal of saving an additional five percent in response to the City of Mesa Water Management Shortage declaration that was enacted on May 18, all City departments are looking for ways to meet this target.

In Gilbert, our Water Conservation Team works with Homeowner Associations, churches, schools, businesses, multifamily apartments, and other commercial water users to help them use water wisely. Through our Water Wise Gilbert program, participants receive a customized water budget for their landscapes, based on the square footage of lawn and shrubs at their specific site.

The City of Glendale Water Services Department offers water efficiency assessments for any commercial water customer free of charge through the Glendale Water Efficiency Program (GWEP). The program has indoor and outdoor components that can be used separately or together depending on customers’ needs.

Phoenix Water launched a digital education page to make learning from home convenient for everyone. The Water Education from the Cloud page, launched this summer, offers water conservation resources for all ages including activity books, games, learning videos for kids and adults, and lesson plans for the educators to use at home.

Every spring, ranchers face the same difficult challenge—trying to guess how much grass will be available for livestock to graze during the upcoming season. Since May 2019, an innovative Grassland Productivity Forecast known as “Grass-Cast” has been helping producers in both the Northern and Southern Great Plains reduce this economically important source of uncertainty.

Active Management Area (AMA) cities routinely build partnerships to make sure they can deliver safe, reliable and affordable water to their residents all day every day. The cities share the cost of building and expanding water and wastewater treatment plants and share underground storage and recharge facilities that replenish aquifers.

As Arizonans, we know how important water is to our communities. That is why we work together to conserve and protect our water resources. At Global Water Resources (Global Water) we take great pride in being a responsible water, wastewater, and recycled water utility and that’s why, like many other water utilities, we offer customers a variety of programs to encourage and assist with saving water.

It might be easy to think of irrigation practices as modern commodities or technologies. Especially in Arizona, where the scorching desert heat makes keeping plants and crops healthy, particularly challenging. While irrigation practices are constantly evolving, some can be traced back to early civilizations.

As we all work together to fight the spread of the coronavirus, Arizona’s water providers can take great pride in knowing they are playing a critical role in public health.

Creating excitement about learning is always the goal for Arizona Project WET (APW). Even with schools closed for safety during the pandemic, APW staff and student Water Educators stepped up to provide unique opportunities for students to learn about water in the comfort of their own homes.

An automated irrigation system waters your yard without you having to think about it – and that’s the problem. If you set your controller and then forget it, this convenient device can cost you money, waste precious drinking water, and weaken your trees and plants.

By conserving water outdoors not only will you save water and money, but you’ll have a vibrant, healthy landscape as well. And since April is Water Awareness Month, we figured it’s a great time to provide some tips and tricks for watering your desert landscape efficiently and effectively.

While many people are having a difficult time finding and purchasing toilet paper, it is causing an existing problem to become an even bigger one. Despite what packaging says, flushable wipes are in fact not flushable.

July is Smart Irrigation Month and with more than half of the drinking water in the Valley used outdoors for the primary purpose of irrigating landscapes, it may be time to learn how to optimize your automated irrigation controller for maximum efficiency.

In 2019, Governor Doug Ducey proclaimed the third week of March as Fix a Leak Week. It is a time to remind all residents of Arizona to check their household fixtures and irrigation systems for common household leaks including dripping faucets, broken irrigation sprinklers, and worn-out toilet flappers to name a few.

If a storm is in the forecast and you must drive, check and replace your windshield wipers. When driving, turn on your lights, increase the distance between you and other vehicles and reduce your speed. Don’t brake suddenly.

Riparian areas and wetlands are the links between land and water. They are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth and are thought of as ribbons of life, networking across various landscapes and biotic communities.

Our warmest thanks to all our partners in celebrating this year’s Water Awareness Month. It was a wonderful month celebration and we were so moved to see all our partners and their communities come together to celebrate.

Office buildings, schools, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, and other commercial and institutional facilities can use a significant amount of water and energy in their daily operations.

The Sonoran Desert is one of the most ecologically diverse deserts in the world with more than 2,000 native plant species and hundreds of wildlife species.

Ever wonder how your water use adds up? Use the new Gilbert water calculator to see how much water your household needs. Compare the calculator’s results with your actual use to see if you have room for savings.

Water efficiency is becoming increasingly important to community water systems within Arizona from a resource management and economic perspective.

By proclamation of the Governor in 2008, it is Water Awareness Month in Arizona. So, what do you suppose that means? On a personal level, being water aware almost universally means learning to conserve water.

During back to school time, Arizona students will be excited to hear their teachers’ plans for them to learn about water in the upcoming year.

As a rule, industries with an economic reliance on a valuable resource tend to be extremely careful in how they use it. Farmers in Yuma County and elsewhere in Arizona, for example, have become experts in laser leveling fields, crop management and water-conserving irrigation techniques.

Irrigated agriculture in Arizona is a $17 billion-per-year industry in transition, according to speakers at a widely acclaimed conference on issues facing Arizona ag earlier this week at the University of Arizona. It is an industry consumed with the most effective and efficient uses of water, its prime ingredient after tillable soil.

To the “end user” – the Tempe or Tucson homeowner turning on the tap to fill a kettle for a cup of tea – it is all just water. In composition, color and consistency, it is no different from the liquid pouring forth from taps anywhere else in the U.S.

Like most communities across Arizona, the Cities of Mesa and Glendale historically considered stormwater to be a nuisance that needed to be quickly eliminated through an expensive pipe and channel system.

It’s getting to be quite the to-do list for the citizen of good conscience. Everyone wants to live sustainably. Everyone wants to do their bit for society. But we all seem to have a lot of bits in our pockets these days. Doing one’s bit can be especially complex when one of our “sustainability” missions clashes with another.

In a 3.2-acre space hemmed in by traffic noise, office buildings and warehouse construction sits a living classroom. The University of Arizona’s Maricopa County Cooperative Extension is a place to learn by doing – plant and nurture desert landscapes, grow vegetables and herbs, or create a rainwater harvesting system.

The City of Phoenix began municipal water utility operations in 1907. Today, Phoenix Water treats and distributes tap water to 1.5 million customers daily, manages the city's sewer system, and handles wastewater treatment operations for 2.5 million residents in the Valley of the Sun.

The years devoted to planning and investing from the creation of engineering water-delivery marvels like the Salt River Project, irrigation projects in the Yuma area , and the Central Arizona Project, to the development of a remarkably successful storage system known as water banking. These big examples – can be viewed primarily as creating a state of readiness. Of asserting a measure of control.