Drought conditions across the West impact a wide range of communities and sectors, including farmers, cities, tribes, the environment, recreation, hydropower producers, the public, and others. Given the widespread impacts, collaboration with customers, partners, and stakeholders is critical to identifying successful drought mitigation strategies.

Collaboration is central to Reclamation’s approach to addressing drought in the West. Reclamation collaborates with water users on water management improvements, water reuse and recycling projects, reservoir operations, the development of science and tools, water supply planning, and more. Some of Reclamation’s program activities are highlighted on this page, with featured projects that demonstrate the benefits of these collaborative efforts to address drought.

Click on the featured project tours to explore projects funded under WaterSMART and by Reclamation’s Research and Development Office.

Through WaterSMART, Reclamation works cooperatively with states, tribes, and local entities to plan for and implement actions to increase water supplies through investments to modernize existing infrastructure and attention to local water conflicts. WaterSMART includes programs providing cost-shared funding for on-the-ground projects to conserve water and increase the efficiency of water deliveries, construct major water reuse and recycling facilities, increase water supply reliability during drought, implement watershed restoration projects, develop applied science tools, and to conduct collaborative planning efforts addressing drought and climate change.

Since September 2021, Reclamation has selected 864 new WaterSMART projects with $431 million in Federal funding in states across the west.

The Research and Development Office (R&D) applies science and technology to advance the agency’s mission to manage, develop, and protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public. R&D's two programs, Science and Technology (S&T) and Desalination and Water Purification Research (DWPR), address the technical obstacles related to Reclamation’s mission. These programs use a combination of internal projects, external calls for proposals, and prize competitions to support innovation, addressing drought via enhanced monitoring, improved forecasting, and technology research to support development of new supplies. In the past six years, R&D has launched 30 prize competitions and awarded more than $3.5M.

In fiscal year 2021, DWPR has provided $3.6M for desalination research projects, S&T is funding 171 internal research projects totaling $11.7M, and $2.5M was awarded to 12 projects related to snow monitoring and water supply forecasting.