In the video, Celeste Cantú, General Manager of the Santa Ana River Watershed Authority, and Robin Gilthorpe, CEO of WaterSmart Software, discuss encouraging more comprehensive and modern water management approaches. One such example, the SAWPA collaboration, integrates management of water projects across a large watershed, instead of relying solely on individual water districts working separately. The SAWPA collaboration—which has invested billions of dollars in water storage, groundwater cleanup, water recycling, and stormwater management—has allowed the region to store and conserve so much water that cities from San Bernardino to Newport Beach have hardly been impacted at all by this year’s drought.

At the 2015 California Economic Summit in Ontario this week, participants committed to promote policies that will save one million acre feet of water each year for the next ten years as part of the Summit’s “One Million Challenges.” Participants including Celeste Cantú, manager at the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, Robin Gilthorpe of WaterSmart.com, A.G. Kawamura of Solutions from the Land, and Jay Ziegler of The Nature Conservancy engaged in an interactive session where they discussed the state of water use in California and committed to the priorities put forward to achieve this challenge.