Water and Planning Network: Ensuring One Water Delivers for Healthy Waterways

The One Water approach offers tremendous opportunities for improving how water is managed within communities. Using water efficiently and taking advantage of diverse, locally available water supplies are important goals. It is also important that the approach support communities in assessing how their water use affects the health of waterways, both upstream, where water is sourced, and downstream, where other communities and aquatic resources may be impacted.  

To realize the full potential of the One Water approach, planners should explicitly acknowledge and quantitatively assess potential threats to healthy waterways, and incorporate actions to protect river flows downstream for the benefit of people and the environment.    

This webinar by the Water and Planning Network, a network of the American Planning Association, talks about the framework developed by the National Wildlife Federation, Pacific Institute and the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment to assist communities in implementing the One Water approach in a way that optimizes water supplies to cities and keeps waters flowing for the creeks, rivers and bays that support healthy fish and wildlife and their habitats.