What We Do

About Carpe Diem West

Carpe Diem West leads a broad-based network of decision makers, scientists, economists, policy experts, and advocates in addressing the unprecedented impacts the growing climate crisis is having on water in the America West.

Dear friends:

In the American West, water is our lifeblood - and we’ve been fighting over it for more than a century. The growing climate crisis challenges us to move beyond these old ways to collaborative solutions for our water and our future.

With increasing urgency, science is telling us that the water the American West relies upon - how much we have, when we get it, and its quality - is being fundamentally altered by changes in our climate. And these changes are not years in the future, they are happening right now. 

A group of western water leaders started Carpe Diem West five years ago because they could see the realities of these changes in climate both made it all the more urgent, and presented new opportunities, to address the old unsustainable ways we’ve managed our water in the American West. Entrenched interests and bureaucracies, shrinking budgets, a growing population, new water-intensive energy production, and damaged ecosystems all add up to a witches’ brew that makes smart, science-based change an enormous challenge.

And that is the task before us: Bringing together competing interests to find cooperative solutions. 

Carpe Diem West’s goal is simple and daunting: smart, science-based solutions that create water security for our communities, the food we grow, our economy and our environment.

All of us have a deep love for the American West. And the people of Carpe Diem West - our core team, our broader network - are committed to bringing the energy, talent and leadership to navigate the very big challenges ahead.

Regards,

Kimery Wiltshire, Executive Director
 

The Carpe Diem Network - Filling A Critical Niche:

“The Carpe Diem process requires a leap of faith - by their very nature the outcomes cannot be predetermined. But if you're serious about investing in smart people working to find a sustainable path forward, it's a leap well worth taking.”  
Steve Whitney Program Officer, The Bullitt Foundation

“There are some places where I get stuck. How do we scale up the pilot projects? We just don’t have enough people. How do we speed up? The climate changes and their impacts are happening faster than expected. The models we were using weren’t too wacky, they weren’t wacky enough.”
Dr. Holly Hartmann Director, Arid Lands Information Center, University of Arizona/CLIMAS

“On our land we see the changes climate change is bringing. The winds dry up the land and streams, and we are seeing more ‘false storms’ – water that falls up high and never reaches the ground.”
Gil Suazo Water Resources Specialist, Former Governor, Taos Pueblo
 

The Carpe Diem Mission:

Carpe Diem West focuses on water security. In our view, water security means ensuring adequate water of sufficient quality and timing to support all uses – for our communities, the food we grow, our economy and our environment – and that there will be an equitable means of sharing shortages when there is not enough to go around. 

We pursue water security by creating links between leaders, by integrating state-of-the-art climate-change science with the needs of a range of stakeholders, by incubating new initiatives, and by promoting sustainable management practices and policies that emerge from the stakeholder process.

While Carpe Diem West works to identify and incubate ideas for policy and management changes, we do not prescribe solutions. Instead, we use the collective wisdom of our leadership network to develop a vision, goals, and a plan for common action. 

Facing this challenge requires us to move beyond historic conflicts and develop sustainable practices and policies to better manage water in a time of increasing uncertainty. Because no one interest group or constituency can, by itself, make the necessary changes, Carpe Diem West connects leaders across previously un-bridged boundaries to create solutions that provide water security for people, the economy, the environment, and food production in the American West.