Dive Brief:
- Google announced a spate of sustainability-focused partnerships on Saturday, also recognized as World Water Day by the United Nations. One of the projects will be based in California, with the others anchored abroad in France, Chile and Taiwan.
- The tech giant said it is backing a range of projects across the globe, including developing innovative irrigation systems to support California’s dairy industry; boosting water infrastructure like irrigation canals and storage reservoirs in Chile’s Maipo Basin; backing an irrigation efficiency pilot project in Changhua, Taiwan; and using artificial intelligence to improve irrigation systems on potato farms in the Seine River basin in France.
- The quartet of water preservation and sustainable farming projects build on Google’s target to restore 120% of the volume of freshwater consumed across its offices and data centers, on average, by 2030.
Dive Insight:
The tech company set its water stewardship target in 2021, and said it aimed to boost water security in the communities it operates in. At the time, Google also said one of its goals was to share resources, technologies and tools that “help everyone predict, prevent and recover from water stress.”
The search engine platform and computer software company also released its 2025 Water Stewardship Project Portfolio report, which listed 112 active water conservation projects Google supports across the globe, as of the end of 2024. The report included updates on projects from stream restorations in Cupertino, California to rainwater collection endeavors in Gurugram, India.
Google said in the March 22 release that the projects collectively replenished around 4.5 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone. The tech giant estimates that, once all of its over 100 global water stewardship and conservation projects are fully operational, they will have the capacity to replenish 8 billion gallons of water annually.
Google said it launched its four most recent partnerships last year with the focus of enhancing water management in agriculture-intensive areas within watersheds that supply its operations. The company said that, as agriculture accounts for almost 70% of all water use around the world, several of its projects “target the critical nexus of agriculture and water security, where solutions are imperative.”
The California project is a partnership with nonprofit Sustainable Conservation and will feature a manure drip irrigation system that aims to provide freshwater and nutrients to crop root zones in the state, according to Google. The Chile project, a partnership with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and water crisis solutions organization Agua Segura, aims to restore water infrastructure that is critical to smallholder farmers that have been impacted by a multi-year drought in the region, the company said.
Meanwhile, the company’s Taiwan project is a collaboration with irrigation solutions company N-Drip to install a gravity-powered drip irrigation system in rice fields. The AI-powered pilot in France is a collaboration with agriculture technology company xFarm Technologies to allow farmers to “irrigate only when, where and how much they need to by combining crop needs with environmental data collected in the field,” per the release.
