Funding
To help build resilience to long-term drought fueled by climate change in the Colorado River Basin, significant investment is needed across the entire Basin. Watershed restoration, forest management, agricultural adaptations, and municipal and industrial conservation are critical strategies that will help local communities, restore ecosystems, and improve overall resilience for the Basin.
The passage of both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) authorized billions of dollars to mitigate risks of drought and a changing climate through resilience improvements for communities, economies, and the environment. Through these and other appropriations, federal agencies, including, but not limited to, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, are providing significant funding opportunities to help reduce the impacts of drought and other natural hazards across the West.
BIL and IRA funding is hitting the ground across the Colorado River Basin, providing an essential down payment on the investments needed to establish resilience across the region. Since the BIL and IRA were authorized, approximately $2 billion per year has been invested in projects across the Colorado River Basin, to help communities and the environment adapt to the impacts of drought, improve aging infrastructure, and stretch water supplies further.
Agencies, Tribes, NGOs, universities, private landowners, and other entities have proven that increased resources from BIL and IRA are needed and can readily launch and scale on-the-ground resilience work. The recent Upper Basin Bucket 2 “Environment” funding received over $560 million in requests with 59 project applications during the funding opening. The need for sustained funding is driven by the impacts of climate change, such as rising air temperature and decreasing June snowpack (snow water equivalent). Evidence of the on-the-ground impacts of increasing temperatures and decreasing soil moisture can be seen in the recent increase in crop insurance expenditures. Hotter temperatures and earlier spring runoff in the Basin highlight the need for producers, municipalities, and ecosystems to find new ways to adapt and build resilience.
Funding Database
The funding opportunities below are a sampling of state and federal programs that support on-the-ground resilience project implementation in the Colorado River Basin. Use the interactive menu below to filter these state and federal funding opportunities by status, project type, government level, and agency. The table is interactive and automatically sorted by application deadline, nearest to furthest date, and can be re-sorted by any of the other column headers. Funding opportunities in grey text have already passed their application deadline. Click on any of the funding opportunities to see a summary view.
