By: Robyn Grimm
On June 3, 2025, the California Water Data Consortium hosted its largest in-person event to date, a Summer Roundtable themed “Putting Water Data to Work: Maximizing the Climate Bond’s Impact”. The sold-out gathering focused on timely feedback to support the roll out of Proposition 4 funding, including investments to support communities managing the impacts of climate extremes, changing land and water management needs, and leveraging emerging technologies.
“This moment calls for both urgency and imagination, and for data systems that reflect the complexity of our challenges and the wisdom of collaboration.”
Meredith Lee, Consortium Board Chair and UC Berkeley
Open Data and Prop. 4: Common Themes from California’s Water Community
Over 100 leaders from across California – local water agencies, Tribal representatives, researchers, funders, and state agency officials – gathered to explore how we can build a more resilient, equitable, and adaptive future through open water data.
What we heard from these leaders was clear:
- Trust is foundational. Open data only works when paired with inclusive engagement, transparent communication, and systems that invite local insight. Trust grows when communities can question, use, and help improve the data shaping decisions that affect them.
- Capacity is critical. We need sustained investment in the people, institutions, and partnerships that make data usable and actionable — especially in under-resourced regions. Infrastructure alone won’t solve complex problems without the support, funding, and capacity-building systems to match.
- Adaptation is a long game. Climate resilience depends not just on short-term projects, but on durable systems for learning, evolving, and stewarding our resources over time. It requires iterative feedback loops and the data governance to support them.
As California enters a period of tighter state budgets, this kind of strategic planning becomes even more important. Project-by-project investments alone won’t get us where we need to go. To build lasting impact, we need regional data architecture that can scale across efforts and agencies to enable shared systems, common standards, and smarter use of limited dollars. The upfront coordination may be harder, but the payoff in efficiency, equity, and long-term resilience is enormous.
A Vision for Regionally Coordinated Data Stewardship
Samantha Arthur, Deputy Secretary for Water at the California Natural Resources Agency, offered thoughtful reflections to close the day. She reminded us that data infrastructure for the Climate Bond’s implementation is about much more than measuring performance; it’s about ensuring communities have the ongoing data assets and human capacity needed to define resilience for themselves, explore tradeoffs, and manage adaptively toward their collective goals. That vision of locally-driven, data-informed stewardship came through again and again.
We also heard resounding support for ideas like:
- Investing early in shared data standards and monitoring frameworks to evaluate impact across regions.
- Designing more holistic data infrastructure to test theories of change rooted not just in hydrology or ecology, but in community capacity, governance, and equity.
- Designing long-term systems that serve not only today’s funding cycle, but the next generation’s climate reality.
This is the work ahead, and it’s why the Consortium will be using the insights from this event to help shape a Data Modernization Roadmap for California’s water future. This roadmap will support Prop. 4 implementation while also offering a longer-term vision for robust, transparent, and community-serving data systems.
Better models and faster data can power smarter decisions. But durable change will come from something deeper: connection, collaboration, and the kind of shared purpose we saw in the room that day.
Learn more about the 2025 Summer Roundtable, view and download event photos, and subscribe to our email newsletter to receive event updates and information.
Thank You
We’re grateful for the support from the Water Foundation and California Department of Water Resources which helped make this event possible. Thanks also to Ariel Ambruster and the facilitation team at Sacramento State, graphic facilitator and illustrator Emily Shepard, and photographer Jason Alviar.
Funding for this project has been provided in full or in part from the Budget Act of 2022 and through an agreement with the State.
