Tucson leads the way

People have lived in and around Tucson, Arizona for 12,000 years, irrigating land along perennial or intermittent stretches of the Santa Cruz River. Farming also occurred on ephemeral washes at the apex of alluvial fans where flow resulting from the sporadic and torrential summer storms supplied water to fields of beans, corn, and squash.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Arizona’s Page Ranch north of Tucson developed innovative ways to harvest and store runoff to support a truck farming business focusing on tree crops. In the 1990s, a small group of dedicated rainwater harvesting practitioners formed the Tucson Permaculture Guild, which provided the foundation for GI in Tucson by developing small-scale,...

In 2009, the City Council passed the nation’s first municipal rainwater harvesting ordinance for commercial projects, which mandated that new business, corporate, or commercial structures supply half the water needed for landscaping from harvested rainwater. Then in 2012, the city’s water utility, Tucson Water, began offering rebates to its residential customers to subsidize...

Ninth Street in the Rincon Heights Neighborhood was originally configured to easily carry four lanes of traffic, but its residential status never generated such volumes. This allowed portions of the road to be narrowed. The sidewalks at some intersections were expanded toward the roadway centerline so crossing pedestrians are exposed to less traffic. Mid-block bump-outs protect parked cars....

The Kino Environmental Restoration Project (KERP) focused on three goals: creating native ecosystems through habitat establishment, harvesting urban stormwater for irrigation of the KERP and surrounding public facilities, and controlling flooding through retention basins that slowly release water downstream. Five distinct ecological communities were created to support high-level, onsite...

Assistant Director Susanna Eden at the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center has worked in water resources research and outreach for more than 30 years. She led a United States Bureau of Reclamation-funded project that developed a Water Harvesting Assessment Toolbox for desert communities, and continues to write and lecture on water harvesting in addition to her other...