Levi’s has announced it’s saved 1 billion liters of water in its manufacturing process. That’s enough to fill 400 Olympic-size pools. That’s enough to make a huge water-footprint dent. That’s enough to provide H20 for days for all of its high-waisted-wearing hipster clientele in New York.

Paul Dillinger, Levi’s vice president of Global Product Innovation, said at a panel Tuesday at South by Southwest that the company has tracked results since 2011 when it began using less water in its finishing process. The reduction efforts include eliminating water during stone washes and combining multiple wet cycles.

During the panel, which was moderated by HuffPost Impact, Dillinger also called on consumers to wash their jeans less frequently. Read more

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Call them the fortunate ones: Nearly 4,000 California companies, farms and others are allowed to use free water with little oversight when the state is so bone dry that deliveries to nearly everyone else have been severely slashed.

Their special status dates back to claims made more than a century ago when water was plentiful. But in the third year of a drought that has ravaged California, these “senior rights holders” dominated by corporations and agricultural concerns are not obliged to conserve water. Read more

Groundwater depletion will soon be as important a factor in contributing to sea-level rise as the melting of glaciers other than those in Greenland and Antarctica, scientists say.

A Tanzanian teenager scoops up muddy water from a well. Many of the world’s aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can replenish, a process that will increase sea level rise.

That’s because water pumped out of the ground for irrigation, industrial uses, and even drinking must go somewhere after it’s used—and, whether it runs directly into streams and rivers or evaporates and falls elsewhere as rain, one likely place for it to end up is the ocean.

To find out how much of an effect this has on sea level, a team of Dutch scientists led by hydrologist Yoshihide Wada, a Ph.D. researcher at Utrecht University, divided the Earth’s land surface into 31-by-31-mile (50-by-50 kilometer) squares on a grid to calculate present and future groundwater usage. Read more

Last week, aerial views of Rampart Reservoir, a critical water-storage facility for Colorado Springs, Colorado, showed spot fires billowing tentacles of smoke over the lake’s forested shores.

“It smelled like a big smelly cigar,” said Andy Funchess, a water systems field operations manager for the Colorado Springs water utility. Funchess spends his workdays monitoring and maintaining the city’s 25 reservoirs and hundreds of miles of pipeline and canals.

Smoke rises around Rampart Reservoir from Waldo Canyon Fire in this aerial photograph taken in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on June 27, 2012.

As strong winds helped the Waldo Canyon Fire puncture black holes into the evergreen landscape around the reservoir, Funchess gave up on trying to predict the fire’s erratic behavior and was evacuated.

The Waldo Canyon Fire, which started 11 days ago and has swept over nearly 18,000 acres, is now 70 percent contained. It hasn’t consumed the reservoir, but could have long-lasting effects on water quality—and even quantity. Read more

Suresh Ponnusami sat back on his porch by the road south of the Indian textile town of Tirupur. He was not rich, but for the owner of a two-acre farm in the backwoods of a developing country he was doing rather well. He had a TV, a car, and a maid to bring him drinks and ensure his traditional white Indian robes were freshly laundered every morning.

Pumping and shipping groundwater in New Delhi and elsewhere in India has become big business, but water table levels are dropping.

The source of his wealth, he said, was a large water reservoir beside his house. And as we chatted, a tanker drew up on the road. The driver dropped a large pipe from his vehicle into the reservoir and began sucking up the contents. Read more