Western Water in 2025: A Year of Widespread Drought and Strategic Positioning

In 2025, drought wasn’t a regional anomaly — it was the backdrop for nearly the entire West. Only California, which began the year with strong reservoir storage and ended 2025 as the only U.S. state not experiencing some level of drought, broke the pattern substantively. Otherwise, the West saw deepening snow drought, early melt, depleted soils, and low streamflows—conditions that defined the hydrologic reality across nearly the entire western United States. From the Pacific Northwest to the Rockies and the Southwest, water managers faced a persistent pattern of scarcity that shaped operations, planning, and policy decisions throughout the year.

Drought was the backdrop against which water managers operated. At the same time, 2025 was a year of strategic positioning in western water policy. The seven Colorado River Basin states continued the complex process of negotiating post‑2026 operating rules. California continued navigating the ongoing Delta regulatory processes. Across the region, states leaned on groundwater management, instream flow tools, drought plans, and conservation programs to navigate a year in which hydrologic stress was the norm.