Envision Utah - Utah Water Strategy Recommendations

Utah Water Strategy Recommendations

In 2013, Governor Gary Herbert asked the State Water Strategy Advisory Team to make recommendations for a 50-year state water strategy. This long-range strategy will help ensure Utah has the water resources that will maintain a high quality of life, a healthy environment, and a thriving economy for generations to come even as Utah’s population doubles by 2060. Envision Utah has facilitated the advisory team, and the team’s efforts were part of the Your Utah, Your Future project, where more than 52,000 Utahns weighed in on their priorities for the future of Utah. The advisory team has also put in countless hours of research, intense discussion, and listening to the public to write these recommendations.

Utah faces a daunting challenge. We have the distinction of being both one of the driest states in the nation and one of the fastest growing. At the convergence of those two realities is the challenge of providing water for a population that is projected to nearly double by 2060 while maintaining strong farms and industries and healthy rivers, lakes, wetlands, and aquifers.

The recommendations that follow do not constitute a prescriptive plan for providing water supplies over the next 50 years; the information and data to definitively create such a plan do not currently exist. Instead, these recommendations provide strategic direction and represent common ground upon which the needed information can be gathered and future decisions can be made. In the Utah tradition of working together to solve difficult problems, the Team has volunteered countless hours to define, plan for, and ultimately achieve a shared, long-term vision. Though additional planning and implementation will be required of stakeholders and the public in years to come, the team has elevated water analysis and discourse to a new level and produced this water strategy with what is likely the broadest and most inclusive body of water expertise that has come together in the history of our state.