Mississippi River Watershed Partnership
The Importance of Partnership
The Mississippi River Watershed consists of over 250 rivers, touching 31 states. With such a wide reach, collaboration is crucial to ensuring that actions taken in one basin of the Watershed is to the benefit of all others.
Get Involved
AWI is always looking for diverse organizations to join the discussion about the health of the Watershed. To join the conversation, contact us at kim.lutz@americaswatershed.org.
Inspired by our mission to connect, America’s Watershed Initiative (AWI), in partnership with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), has engaged dozens of government, community, industry, and NGO leaders to explore ways to address the challenges impacting the Watershed. Emerging from those discussions, a goal took shape to build a diverse and robust partnership across different sectors to develop shared priorities across the entire Watershed.
This Partnership would act as one voice to generate broad support and dedicated funding to drive integrated on-the-ground action to improve the health of the Watershed for the human and natural communities that depend on it.
Why do we need a Mississippi River Watershed Partnership?
The Mississippi River Watershed is the only large watershed in the United States without formal coordination of programmatic activities and comprehensive dedicated funding across its sub-Basins. It lacks an integrated, watershed-based approach to address urgent and interrelated economic, ecological, and community challenges.
“When you face an intractable problem – enlarge it – within this expansion there will be zones of agreement.”
General Peter “Duke” DeLuca, from Dwight Eisenhower
Creating Space for Discussion: the June 2024 MRWP Workshop
Designed with the Upper Mississippi River Association, the Ohio River Basin Association, the Red River Valley Association, the Lower Mississippi River Conservation Committee, and many others, Mississippi River Watershed Partnership Workshop was held in St. Louis, Missouri on June 25 – 27, 2024.
Our Workshop Goals:
- To provide a venue to share work being done in each Basin and to explore how a partnership could add value to an already robust body of work within the Mississippi River Watershed.
- To develop a common understanding and shared language around the issues facing the Watershed, such as water quality, floods and droughts, inland navigation, fish and wildlife and recreation and gave space to understand the leadership challenges in the Watershed.
The Findings:
Over 100 leaders and scientists from 21 states and the District of Columbia, representing 8 federal agencies, 13 state agencies, 27 non-governmental organizations, 7 corporations, and 5 academic institutions, came together and determined just how important formalizing the Partnership will be to their shared work. This highly engaged group brought their extensive experience and diverse perspectives on Watershed challenges and the work being done from the local to the national level. To read the findings in full, click here.
