Water Utility Partnerships

In the western U.S., 65% of surface water originates on forested land. Healthy forests store snowpack, filter water, and stabilize soils — but drought and catastrophic wildfire are putting these critical watersheds at risk. Until now, opportunities for water utilities to invest in protecting these forests have been scarce.

The Forest Resilience Bond (FRB) changes that. Through the FRB, water utilities can invest directly in the watershed health that their systems depend on — enhancing source water reliability, reducing infrastructure risk, and building more resilient communities.

As a utility, the resilience of your infrastructure and the reliability of your water delivery depend on the health of the forested headwaters that are part of the watershed. Partnering with Blue Forest enables you to take meaningful action in the places that matter most to your operations.

We partner on restoration projects in your headwaters or geographically connected watersheds, aligned with your priorities and designed around outcomes that matter — reduced wildfire risk, avoided sedimentation, protected water quality, and increased supply. Every project is built to reduce risk to your systems and the communities you serve, while maintaining the healthy watersheds your operations depend on.

Through science based modeling and impact reporting, we help you understand and communicate the value of restoration to your organization, local communities, decision makers, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders.Our quantification work translates ecological outcomes into terms that speak to your operations, whether the priority is reducing wildfire risk to infrastructure, improving water quality and reducing water treatment costs, enhancing long-term reliability and water supply. 

Restoration has long been the purview of landowners and managers, leaving little room for others who benefit from healthy forests to participate. Blue Forest brings stakeholders together, such as  land managers, Native nations, utilities, NGOs, corporations, and government agencies, to build alignment and advance planned and permitted restoration projects faster and at a greater scale in priority locations.

As a project gains momentum, we bring additional utilities and corporations to the table, sharing costs, increasing revenue, and accelerating work through below-market loans to implementers. This collaborative model works because of utility participation: it unlocks funding, speeds project delivery, and multiplies the benefit each partner receives. As more utilities move on wildfire mitigation, the opportunity to join that momentum is now.