With more than 39 million residents, booming agricultural and hospitality industries, and a diverse set of natural ecosystems, California and its future are highly dependent on its water resources. But due to drought cycles, climate change and other challenges, the sustainable future of water in the state is precarious.
With campuses across the state, the California State University is making strides to protect this resource. The university's multicampus initiative
CSU-WATER (Water Advocacy Toward Education and Research) plays a pivotal role in coordinating and supporting these efforts through funded research, community engagement, workforce development, partnerships with water agencies and stakeholders, and more.
“Policy drives so much in California water management, including water allocations among often conflicting demands which exceed an increasingly unpredictable supply. Fortunately, state agencies and many legislative interests are diligently preparing for this uncertain water future," said Steve Blumenshine, CSU-WATER executive director. “CSU researchers contribute to the discovery of the best avenues of California water and climate resiliency while training the future water leaders in the state. The CSUs are unmatched in linking and leveraging community, government and educational resources."
Most recently, CSU-WATER, in partnership with the Kenneth L. Maddy Institute based at Fresno State, hosted a
statewide webinar series in January and February 2026 for students, faculty and stakeholders. Aiming to explain how California's legislature shapes water policy and how emerging leaders can get involved, the three sessions respectively focused on how the state legislature works; today's most pressing water policy issues and workforce needs; and the future of climate resilience, planning and leadership.
“This webinar series supports the mission of CSU-WATER to engage and assist the future California water leaders as we head into a somewhat murky water future and the multiple demands on freshwater,"
Blumenshine said. “The CSU-WATER team and our partners in this effort are very grateful for our diverse and wonderful panelists for their contributions to the webinar series."
Another key goal of CSU-WATER is collaboratively developing the future leaders and experts working in water policy and management by supporting current CSU students. In 2025, the group hosted several Classroom to Careers webinars for students with California Urban Water Agencies. The sessions covered important information on launching careers and connected students with industry professionals, among other topics.
“These are great paying careers, and they're stable because you need to know what's going to happen when you turn the tap on," Blumenshine said. “Water careers are drought-proof and recession-proof."
In addition, CSU-WATER's
Bridges Program, formerly the Faculty Incentive Program, funds faculty research and work with the purpose of strengthening student-centered teaching and workforce preparedness. The funded projects are not only addressing California's water challenges and future, but provide students with hands-on learning preparing them for future careers.
Learn about three CSU projects recently funded by CSU-WATER.
Stormwater Scholars
Julian Fulton, Environmental Studies professor at Sacramento State, received a CSU-WATER grant to expand experiential learning and community engagement through monitoring trash pollution in urban stormwater systems.
Students in his California Water and Society course are trained in conducting trash assessments using a mobile application developed by Fulton's team, Trash Rapid Assessment Data Exchange. They document the pollution at a given site by logging the amount of litter and taking photos.
“It's a qualitative, but very structured and well-defined, assessment used by professional consultants in the stormwater field," Fulton said. “We see this as an opportunity to engage students in professional activities to develop professional skills and to learn core educational skills that they can bring into their jobs, including computer science, an understanding of regulatory policy and environmental field methods."
A Sacramento State student conducts a trash assessment using the research team's mobile application.
The assessments are conducted on Sacramento State's campus, which is one of 18 CSUs designated as stormwater permittees that must comply with state stormwater permit regulations. Students survey designated sites on the campus stormwater system, and the information is shared with campus staff and facilities to ensure permit compliance.
While the project was initially launched, as well as expanded to municipal areas on the San Francisco Bay, with a variety of other grants, Fulton is currently applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant to scale the work to 12 other universities in the CSU system through a faculty learning community and to enhance the application with artificial intelligence capabilities.
“By practicing participatory science, when students go into these professions, they're going to think about their role as a scientist and as a professional differently," Fulton said. “They're going to be more responsive to input from the community. I hope that this work has the larger social impact of making our state agencies and municipal governments more responsive to communities, which makes them more accountable and helps the public feel more engaged."
Model Action
With CSU-WATER funding,
Matthew Weingarten, San Diego State associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, was able to bring on one of his master's students, Logan Platt, as a Ph.D. student to conduct new research with the U.S. Geological Survey's California Water Science Center. With support from Weingarten and the center, Platt developed a groundwater model that would look at the large-scale effects of over-pumping across the critically overdrafted aquifers of the southern Central Valley.
Currently, under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, local stakeholders must report on their individual groundwater regions and goals for ensuring sustainable pumping—but this reporting does not indicate the long-term effects of collective pumping on the aquifer as a whole. Platt's model demonstrated that there are larger, transboundary effects of groundwater pumping on the aquifer that are not being addressed through the current reporting structure. His work has been turned into an academic paper recently accepted by the Water Resources Research journal.
“We hope that our paper motivates the academic world, the local stakeholders and potentially others to at least think about the possibility of these more long-range effects and what can be done about it," Weingarten said.
He hopes to grow his partnership with the California Water Science Center to introduce more students to their work, including undergraduate field trips to the center.
“Getting students exposed to real-world problems where they can use their skills to address them is the most effective way to show students what they can use their CSU education for," Weingarten said. “The more students can get exposed to these types of programs in school, the more likely they are to complete their degree and be successful after school."
Real-Time Research
Each fall and spring semester, Jackie Guilford, Sonoma State faculty lecturer, teaches a Water Research course that gives students the opportunity to pursue a single research question over an academic year. The questions come from funding partners who need the information for policy decisions, requiring students to both craft and carry out the research project.
“Because we're starting from scratch, the students learn all stages of research," Guilford said. “They learn how to approach a new question that's being asked by an agency, and they're looking at the data and trying to make decisions. A lot of experiments usually done in the classroom are so practiced and tried and true that students don't get a chance to fail and try over. In the process, they gain skills that employers value, including troubleshooting, critical thinking, data analyzing and protocol development."
In past years, the students in the course have tested
water quality upstream and downstream of homeless encampments along Santa Rosa Creek to quantify human fecal bacteria and measured levels of phosphorus in the Laguna de Santa Rosa to determine where Sonoma Water could remove the most phosphorus-rich sediment to generate water quality trading credits.
Beginning in fall 2025 and using a grant from CSU-WATER, Guilford's 15 research students began building a website documenting Copeland Creek, a small creek that runs through Sonoma State's campus, in partnership with SSU's Center for Environmental Inquiry. The website will serve as a searchable database of all past projects and restoration efforts related to the creek for use by students, community members and partnering agencies.
Sonoma State Lecturer Jackie Guilford (seventh from left) and her fall 2025 research group gather at Copeland Creek.
The class is also establishing an ongoing water quality monitoring program for the creek, including measuring temperature, pH, bacterial levels and more, as well as surveying other elements such as plant and animal life, trash pollution and human use.
“Within the larger Copeland Creek project, smaller groups of students are independently developing their own research questions based on their interests. I provide guidance but for the most part, they are designing their own mini experiments—in the process developing important skills that employers are going to be looking for," Guilford said.
Learn more about
CSU-WATER, and read about other CSU work around water policy and management in the
2025 Economic Impact Report.