FRESHWATER PROTECTION
SAFEGUARDING WATER FOR PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE
All life on Earth needs water to survive.
Life-giving rivers, which feed lakes and seas, are in turn fed by springs, creeks, swamps, wetlands and underground aquifers — all sources of water people need for drinking, growing food, recreation, and daily activities. Fresh water keeps us healthy in our bodies and minds.
The water we rely on is also essential to an amazing array of animals and plants from the top to the bottom of the food web: fish, turtles, dragonflies, frogs, crayfish, orchids, otters and countless others.
Protecting fresh water in all its forms protects the wildlife who live in and near it. The reverse is also true: Protecting freshwater wildlife safeguards clean water. All of it benefits people.
But freshwater biodiversity is rapidly declining — at twice the rate of that in oceans and forests. Of the 29,500 freshwater-dependent species that have been assessed for the IUCN Red List, 27% are threatened with extinction. That’s why the Center works to protect fresh water and the animals and plants who depend on it.
Learn about our work for water across the United States — and specifically in the Southwest, California, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Basin, the Rocky Mountains, the Southeast, the Midwest, and Alaska.
WATERSHED PROTECTION
All water is connected. What people do on land affects entire watersheds — the land areas that channel rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers and eventually out to lakes, reservoirs, bays and the ocean.
Thinking about water protection through a watershed-focused lens shows how people’s actions can have ripple effects downstream, for both humans and wildlife.
Exactly 51 years after Ohio’s Cuyahoga River famously caught fire due to pollution in 1969 — before the Clean Water Act’s passage — in 2020 the river again burst into flame when a fuel tanker crashed and spilled its burning contents into the water. Then, ruling on Sackett v. EPA in 2023, the Supreme Court gutted the Clean Water Act by stripping federal protections from countless of our nation’s waterways and wetlands, leaving these critical ecosystems exposed to devastating pollution and filling.
Now more U.S. fresh waters are at risk than ever before from an increasing barrage of threats:
- Groundwater is extracted and used unsustainably. There’s not enough surface water to go around, and what water there is gets overallocated.
- Wetlands are destroyed and degraded (including by filling).
- Industrial exploitation — like fossil fuel extraction, agriculture, mining, logging, grazing, factory farms and pharmaceuticals — ruins water quality.
- Human population growth raises water demand.
- Climate change brings sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion, and severe storm events, as well as reduction of the winter snowpacks that feed spring runoff and increasing water temperatures that can be fatal to wildlife.
- Increased urban development adds more roads, pavement and other impervious surfaces that can worsen harmful runoff into our waterways.
Especially considering that only 2.5% of our planet's water is fresh — and most of that’s locked up in glaciers — protecting this vital resource couldn't be more urgent.
STORYMAP: SaveOurFreshWater.org |
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Check out this interactive storymap about the Center's work to save freshwater species and habitat. |
OUR CAMPAIGN
For decades the Center has been working to safeguard freshwater for people, plants and animals. We envision healthy waterways that are safe for drinking and swimming and provide high-quality habitat for native species. Our vision includes thoughtful human communities committed to quality of life, conservation, and a smart use of water that leaves enough in waterways for wildlife to thrive.
We believe people must do a better job of keeping waterways clean and sharing them with other species. Otherwise we risk erasing great beauty and unraveling ecological relationships.
Above all, water is the source of life: By protecting streams and rivers and the wildlife who depend on them, we’re also protecting ourselves.
Nationwide Freshwater Wins
Protecting fresh water across the United States is critical, particularly since water heeds no political boundaries. The Center has fought to prevent harmful pesticides from being applied to U.S. waterways. Following a major legal victory secured by the Center, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to complete consultations under the Endangered Species Act on the nationwide “pesticide general permit” — issued by the EPA under the Clean Water Act every five years — to prevent harm to protected species like bull trout, pallid sturgeon and Oregon spotted frogs. The agreement we secured also requires the EPA to take additional actions to improve pollution monitoring and other permit-compliance requirements under the Clean Water Act to protect freshwater species against harm from these pesticide applications until 2025.
The Center has fought to reduce toxic water pollution from coal-fired power plants that discharge hundreds of millions of pounds of mercury, selenium and other heavy metals into the nation’s waters each year. Our litigation resulted in new rules issued by the EPA that will end virtually all these discharges within the next decade, and we're continuing efforts to force the remaining 200 coal plants to shutter the operations even sooner.
The Center secured a precedent-setting agreement requiring the EPA to assess impacts on endangered species when it develops its nationwide water quality criteria, which are the bedrock requirements that all states must meet when they set their state-level standards. We won on cadmium in 2023 and are seeking even stronger protections against “forever chemicals” — aka PFAS — in the nation’s waters moving forward.
Water in the Southwest
In the Southwest we’re fighting to preserve special places like Fossil Creek, the San Pedro and Verde rivers, and the Gila River in New Mexico — while also working to save endangered species who depend on desert rivers, including southwestern willow flycatchers, Chiricahua leopard frogs and spikedace and loach minnow fish. We’re working to safeguard the springs and seeps of the Grand Canyon, as well as fighting a massive open-pit copper mine that would dewater Cienega Creek (an important refuge for many endangered species) and destroy aquatic habitats in the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona.
- Forced Fort Huachuca to drastically reduce its water use to save the San Pedro River from dewatering and protect endangered species like yellow-billed cuckoos, the Huachuca water umbel, Sonoran tiger salamanders, and the hundreds of birds and other species that depend on this rare intact riparian corridor for their journeys north.
- Forced the U.S. Forest Service to remove cows from hundreds of miles of streams to protect southwestern willow flycatchers, loach minnows, spikedace and others.
- Spearheaded Fossil Creek dam removal, restoring this important refuge for native fish.
- Obtained Endangered Species Act protection for dozens of species dependent on the Southwest’s rivers, including southwestern willow flycatchers; yellow-billed cuckoos; Gila, headwater and roundtail chub fishes; Mexican and narrow-headed garter snakes; and Chiricahua and relict leopard frogs.
- Gained Endangered Species Act protection for Austin blind salamanders, Jollyville Plateau salamanders and other unique, highly sensitive cave-dwelling animals seriously threatened by groundwater pumping.
- Gained Endangered Species Act protection for several freshwater mussel species and for the sharpnose and smalleye shiners, two small minnow species that live only in prairie streams in the arid upper Brazos River watershed.
- Won a landmark settlement agreement forcing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose Endangered Species Act protection for six species of invertebrates that live in two sets of springs in drought-parched West Texas: Phantom Cave snails, Phantom springsnails, diminutive amphipods, Diamond Y Spring snails, Gonzales springsnails and Pecos amphipods.
- Continued to challenge the federal government’s management of Colorado River flows to safeguard against climate change impacts and provide necessary water and habitat necessary to recover the Colorado River’s four endangered fish species that exist nowhere else on Earth: Colorado pikeminnows, razorback suckers, bonytail chubs and humpback chubs.
- Defeated several pumped storage hydropower proposals that threatened rivers, springs, and endangered species.
Water in California
In California the Center is at the forefront of our nation's sweeping, coast-to-coast movement against fracking, which threatens groundwater with contamination and loss through excessive withdrawal. We’re also working to protect the San Francisco–San Joaquin Bay Delta, challenging efforts to privatize the State Water Project, and opposing proposed increased water diversions through the Delta tunnel and Sites Reservoir projects that would severely dewater the Delta and could send dozens of aquatic species and all Central Valley salmon runs spiraling toward extinction. The Center is fighting to keep water flowing in rivers up and down California — including the Big Sur, Santa Clara and Santa Ana — to protect these rivers’ important ecosystems. We’re also actively opposing several groundwater mining projects in the Mojave Desert that would pump ecologically important groundwater to fuel unsustainable exurban sprawl in Southern California. And we’re fighting to win or improve Endangered Species Act protections for Bay Delta fish species that have been in a population freefall because of excessive water withdrawals, including delta smelt, longfin smelt and Central Valley steelhead.
- Defeated funding for a Delta tunnel project that would pump billions of gallons of water from the Sacramento River and send it to Southern California.
- Obtained Endangered Species Act protection for dozens of species dependent on the Golden State’s abundant freshwaters, including the southern population of green sturgeon, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, and birds like yellow-billed cuckoos and southwestern willow flycatchers.
- Protected salmon and waterways from destructive suction dredge mining for more than 15 years.
- Successfully challenged the California Department of Fish and Game’s stocking of nonnative trout in hundreds of lakes and rivers across the state, leading to sharp restrictions that prevent stocking in habitat for endangered amphibians or fish that are vulnerable to predators.
- Defeated a sprawl development project in the San Bernardino Mountains that would have significantly dewatered Lake Arrowhead.
Water in the Pacific Northwest
Farther north, in the Pacific Northwest, the Center is working to protect salmon streams from silt pollution caused by logging, campaigning to keep coal-export barges off the Columbia River, and fighting FEMA’s flood insurance program, which ignores its impacts on federally protected salmon and other species. We’re seeking Endangered Species Act protection for Oregon’s most imperiled freshwater dwellers, including Crater Lake newts — whose populations have plummeted because of warming lake temperatures and invasive predatory crayfish — and wonder caddisflies, tiny river-dwelling insects who only live below one waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge and are severely threatened by climate change. We’re also working to protect spring Chinook salmon, who live and spawn in the coastal rivers of Oregon and Washington.
- Forced Oregon to dramatically expand no-logging buffers around hundreds of miles of rivers and streams on more than a half a million acres of forests to protect threatened coho salmon.
- Sought endangered species protections for spring Chinook salmon that live and spawn in the coastal rivers of Oregon and Washington.
- Gained Endangered Species Act protection and secured critical habitat for Oregon spotted frogs, since then helping guide restoration and recovery work for the species.
- Protected fish habitat in Oregon’s rivers and streams from harmful suction dredge mining practices and advocated for stronger protections from suction dredge mining in Washington.
Water in the Great Basin
In the arid Great Basin states of Nevada and Utah, the Center has fought to protect precious freshwater areas and the unique animals and plants that rely on them. The Center, both alone and as a member of the Great Basin Water Network coalition, is a key advocate for ensuring native species and ecosystems retain the precious little water they need for survival. In Nevada we're fighting to protect rare species in freshwater habitats and to make sure wildlife have legal rights to water for the future. In 2009 the Center filed a scientific petition to grant Endangered Species Act protection and designate critical habitat for 42 imperiled springsnails of the Great Basin and Mojave ecosystems in Nevada, California and Utah. These imperiled species rely on adequate groundwater supplies that are free of harmful chemical pollution, such as from fracking or mining.
- Obtained a landmark ruling that rejected the state of Nevada’s allocation of groundwater from rural communities and important habitat areas toward unsustainable sprawl outside of Las Vegas.
- Won Endangered Species Act protection for Dixie Valley toads, who live in unique wetlands fed by hot springs that could be dried up by geothermal energy development.
- Filed a lawsuit forcing the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw its authorization of a proposed lithium mining exploration project at the edge of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a lush Mojave Desert oasis where dozens of springs form expansive wetlands.
- Led a multifaceted coalition in a campaign to protect some of the last remaining unprotected Great Salt Lake Basin biological wetlands from industrial development, including impacts to areas adjacent to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and habitat for the June sucker, a fish endemic to Utah Lake and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Water in the Rocky Mountains
In the Rocky Mountains states, the Center is fighting for Endangered Species Act protection for freshwater species like Upper Missouri River graylings and Yellowstone, Rio Grande and Colorado River cutthroat trout. Meanwhile we’re working to make sure human recreation and other threats don’t push rare wildlife past the point of no return.
- Prevented harm to threatened bull trout from a massive private marina and luxury development at the mouth of Trestle Creek on Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille by forcing the Army Corps of Engineers to revoke its permit.
- Forced the Army Corps to conduct experimental test releases out of Libby Dam’s spillway in an effort to mimic spring floods and help Kootenai River white sturgeon successfully reproduce, which they haven’t done since 1974.
- Halted a private corporation from building a luxury resort on Montana’s Holland Lake that would have harmed the bull trout and west slope cutthroat trout who call the lake home.
- Stopped the Knotty Pine logging project, which would have increased sedimentation and damaged critical bull trout habitat.
- Sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect imperiled Artic graylings under the Endangered Species Act.
Water in the Southeast
In the Southeast, a global center for freshwater diversity — and, sadly, freshwater species extinction — we're working to protect more than 400 aquatic species, including amphibians and reptiles, mussels and crayfish, aquatic insects, and wetland birds like black rails and Florida sandhill cranes. We’re working to end mountaintop-removal coal mining, which buries streams forever under tons of toxic mining waste and dirt. We’re working to save fresh waters from toxic algae in Florida. And across the South we’ve successfully campaigned for greater protections for southern and midwestern freshwater turtles.
- Helped win a ruling that federal agencies had violated the law in approving Florida’s takeover of the Clean Water Act wetlands permitting program.
- Filed an extensive scientific petition seeking Endangered Species Act protection for 404 of the Southeast’s aquatic and wetland species.
- Won Endangered Species Act protection for dozens of species including the Pearl River map turtle, Neuse River waterdog, candy darter, magnificent ramshorn snail, and Ouachita fanshell mussel.
- Shut down many illegal off-road vehicle trails in the Big Cypress Preserve, protecting the swamp from sediment pollution.
- Saved numerous Southeast species from the very brink of extinction, including spring pygmy sunfish, Guyandotte River crayfish, southern bog turtles, and Canoe Creek clubshell mussels.
- Led a campaign to protect the Okefenokee Swamp from mining.
- Sought endangered species protection for Alabama shad, wide-ranging fish who’ve disappeared from 90% of their rivers across the South.
Water in the Midwest
Within the Midwest region, the Great Lakes contain nearly 85% of North America’s surface freshwater and more than 20% of the world’s surface freshwater. That’s why we’re working to save it from large-scale mining bringing toxic pollution. The Center has also fought to save native freshwater turtles from unregulated commercial “harvesting” — where wildlife traders kidnap terrapins from their native ponds to supply overseas food markets and the pet industry. Center petitions have led to bans or important restrictions on commercial turtle trapping in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, New York, Minnesota, and South Carolina — as well as Nevada and Texas.
- Filed a petition to protect 53 U.S. amphibians and reptiles under the Endangered Species Act, pushing many listings forward — including for wood turtles and Blanding’s turtles in the Midwest and Northeast.
- Filed a lawsuit, with Tribes and other allies, that revoked the Clean Water Act section 404 permit for the proposed PolyMet mine, which would pollute and destroy high-quality wetlands at the headwaters of the St. Louis River watershed (which flows into Lake Superior).
- Worked with local partners to gain stronger protections for Ohio’s Big Darby Creek.
Water in Alaska
Alaska is home to more than 60% of the nation’s wetlands and innumerable pristine rivers and streams. Millions of salmon and birds and hundreds of thousands of caribou return to these wetlands and streams year after year to birth their young in Alaska’s incredibly fecund freshwater systems. But these wetlands and streams are facing ever-present threats from massive mining projects, oil and gas drilling, and clearcut logging, while climate change heats up Alaska two to four times faster than the rest of the country. Through advocacy and litigation, the Center has fought to protect tens of millions of acres of freshwater habitat imperiled species rely on across Alaska.
- Won increased protections for wetlands from oil drilling in the Western Arctic Reserve, where North America’s largest caribou herds raise their young in the summer and polar bears den in the frozen winter months.
- Fought the rollback of the Roadless Rule in the Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, to ensure that its undisturbed streams stay undisturbed from clearcut old-growth logging.
- Helped protect the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs in the Bristol Bay watershed from the Pebble Mine.
- Won litigation that required the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to reconsider permits for the Ambler industrial mining road, which would have crossed thousands of streams in the Arctic’s Brooks Range, including within the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.