Sustainable Northwest

At Sustainable Northwest, we believe healthy landscapes are good for nature, people, and local economies. We partner with rural communities and Tribal Nations throughout the Northwest on projects that promote smart water use, clean energy, and healthy forests, farms, and ranches.

Our solutions are as unique as the problems we solve and include entrepreneurship, policy, market innovations, public or private investment, collaboration, and technical assistance – but the ultimate success of our work is based on relationships, trust, and inclusion.

In the Klamath River Basin – one of the most ecologically and culturally significant landscapes in the West – Sustainable Northwest is partnering with Klamath Tribes, state and federal governments, and local ranchers and farmers to advance an innovative model of water sustainability and agricultural and forest resilience. Our goal is to restore key Upper Klamath Basin ecological function and processes by balancing the water supply to meet critical ecosystem, Tribal, and other community needs. To achieve this, we will apply a diverse suite of market and policy mechanisms to reduce water consumption and increase supply, including:

• Initiating Wood River Valley Dryland Ranching. Several ranchers in Wood River Valley have expressed interest in transitioning to dryland (non-irrigated) ranching, funded in part by selling senior “wet” water rights. Together, these ranches could provide up to 25,000 acre-feet of water for ecological purposes. Sustainable Northwest has moved this initiative from concept to practice with one precedent-setting lease of water from a ranch to the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge; within two years, they seek to facilitate the lease-to-purchase of this water and to expand the program to at least two other sellers.
• Initiating an Upper Klamath Groundwater Retirement Program. The Klamath Tribes and Sustainable Northwest will advance a program to provide payments for the voluntary and permanent relinquishment of landowner groundwater rights. Our three-year goal is a fully approved and recognized federal and state program.
• Accelerating Large Landscape Scale Conservation and Restoration. Sustainable Northwest partners on collaborative forest and agricultural efforts to implement large, targeted conservation and restoration actions. This includes modeling the beneficial impacts of landscape-scale restoration and wildfire mitigation treatments on over one million acres of the Klamath Tribes’ ancestral lands in the Fremont-Winema National Forest.