Taking a Dive & Unpacking the policies

Three Emerging Water Business Opportunities

  • Source Water Protection

  • Direct Potable Reuse

  • Desalination

These three emerging market segments offer opportunities for California and Western water managers, but the window to establish credibility is closing. Based on current funding flows and agency procurement timelines, we’ve estimated the accessible California market for these services at $400 million to $1 billion in professional fees and planning through 2030.

In this report, we dive into the what, why, and how to accelerate these three strategies. This report is for water managers (agencies, NGOs, Tribes, consultants), primarily in California, but it also applies to other Western states.

All three emerging opportunities share a core principle: California's and the West's 20th-century water infrastructure was built for a stable climate that no longer exists.  

Many agencies, Tribes, and municipalities are now building a diverse, locally controlled, climate-resilient water portfolio—protecting existing resources (watersheds), recycling wastewater (IPR, DPR), and developing new sources (desalination)—because no single approach is sufficient.

September 2026

Three Drop - Connecting Drops

October 7, 2026

How do we connect all of the dots to make One Water projects more resilient to all the challenges we know are coming?

Here’s what we’re looking at –

1.    We need to stop planning around where organizational boundaries end and start planning around where the water goes.

2.    California's water system does not begin at a reservoir, groundwater basin, treatment plant, or conveyance facility. It begins in landscapes.

3.    Headwaters function as infrastructure, but natural infrastructure continues throughout the entire water pathway, not only at its source.

4.    The natural environment is both infrastructure and a water user; it provides services to the water system and has its own operating requirements.

One Water will become an effective management model only when planning, regulation, governance, financing, data, and investment can work across the boundaries that divide the physical system.

Here’s what we’re doing this Fall - Please take a look at this summary:

Connecting Dots - One Water

  1. Starting the conversation (that’s where all of you come in!) Comments, please, on this PPT.

  2. Incorporating feedback, issuing a report that will go into more detail on the ‘why’, ‘how’, and what’s next.

Next up this Winter:

  1. Incorporating the work ACWA is doing on this, present a regulatory framework for what is needed to get there.

  2. Building the community

  3. Assessing One Water - Source to System ptojects

The evolution of water management has given rise to what we increasingly call One Water: the idea that water should be managed as an interconnected resource rather than through separate institutional and infrastructure silos. Yet California's transition remains incomplete. We’ve gotten better at connecting managed water resources in plans and projects, but not at consistently understanding or managing the full system of physical, ecological, operational, human, institutional, and economic forces that shape outcomes.