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Circle of Blue and True Elements Launch Situation: Colorado River from Stockholm World Water Week

Colorado River faces a “collective nightmare.”
New platform delivers a shared view to help inform decisions and collaboration.
Situation: Colorado River is part of Designing Water’s Future, the initiative to create “a new operating system for the world’s fresh water” — aligning across finance, policy, media, and innovation.

STOCKHOLM (August 27, 2026) — As some 2,000 experts gather for World Water Week to address global water challenges and solutions, Circle of Blue and True Elements today launch a new, live data, information and context platform for the Colorado River basin, which faces unprecedented stress as the river and its reservoirs set record lows that are forcing a dramatic reset of water use across the American West. The river supports approximately $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity and 16 million jobs across seven basin states, 30 Tribal Nations, and northwestern Mexico.

Situation: Colorado River begins with real-time and historical data collected into a strategic, user-friendly dashboard. In the face of increasing stress on the basin, the team, which includes reporters from Circle of Blue, will add on-the-ground context to deliver critical insights for policymakers, negotiators, journalists, businesses, and the public.

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“We have a colossal failure to act in the face of an inevitable collective nightmare — and all the predictions are coming true faster than we thought.”
Felicia Marcus

The core data is assembled from True Elements’ TrueQi system — an advanced and comprehensive resources platform that includes satellite observations and river gauges as well as drought indicators, wildfire detections, and reservoir measurements.

The platform arrives at an inflection point for the American West as Lake Mead and Lake Powell reach record low levels amid a warming climate. The combined storage of the two reservoirs is now lower than at any point since 1957 — before Glen Canyon Dam existed. Ninety-five percent of the basin remains in drought.

“The basin’s assumptions are being reset in real time, and everyone — federal, state, Tribal, corporate, business, communities — needs a trusted, shared view of what is actually happening,” said J. Carl Ganter, co-founder and managing director of Circle of Blue, the international nonprofit reporting on fresh water and its “nexus” intersections with food, energy, infrastructure, and health.

The TrueQi platform from True Elements collects real-time and historical federal, state, satellite, and sensor data across the Colorado River basin, the broader American West and globally. As it expands, Situation: Colorado River layers Circle of Blue’s journalism, along with reporting from network partners, on top of key data points, with additional context from academic and research collaborators.

“Real-time and cross-sector data is the foundation while the context makes it real and relevant,” said Kim Kobza, CEO of True Elements. “TrueQi already delivers the most granular water intelligence in the field. Pairing it with Circle of Blue’s award-winning reporting turns raw numbers into shared guidance.”

“Situation: Colorado River pulls the data together and makes it accessible to everyone making decisions under the pressure of declining water supplies. We do this with a sense of urgency, humility and collaboration in the face of increasing water crises globally,” Ganter said. It is part of Designing Water’s Future, Circle of Blue’s international initiative to better inform and align action across finance, policy, media, innovation, and the public.

The situation is forcing a reckoning for farmers, developers, cities, and industries, including silicon chip manufacturers and data centers. “We have a colossal failure to act in the face of an inevitable collective nightmare — and all the predictions are coming true faster than we thought,” Felicia Marcus, past chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, told Circle of Blue.

As the basin’s operating assumptions are tested, Situation: Colorado River asks a core question:

What data points and contexts are necessary to inform the most important decisions across the Colorado River basin, and how can new data and intelligence approaches be applied across the U.S. and globally?

The initiative launches with a call for public and expert input at an historic moment. Submit thoughts, questions, suggestions and corrections to coloradoriver@circleofblue.org. This will shape the initiative’s next iterations of data selection and analysis, editorial focus and priority coverage.

Also available now is Water Savvy 3.0, a free mobile app from True Elements available on the Apple App Store that puts real-time water quality data, alerts and reporting into the hands of the public and students.

The platform is live online today from Stockholm. It is free and designed to be a trusted source for newsrooms, businesses, policymakers, academic researchers, students and the public. A more comprehensive enterprise insights system is available to businesses, agencies, and governments. Circle of Blue original content publishes under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

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About Circle of Blue

Circle of Blue® is the U.S.-based nonprofit media, intelligence, and convening organization reporting on fresh water worldwide as it intersects food, energy, and climate security, economic and environmental stability, and social equity. Circle of Blue uniquely combines trusted front-line reportage, science, data analytics, systems design, and collaborative convening toward solutions. For more than 20 years, institutions including the World Bank, World Economic Forum, The Vatican, and U.S. Department of State have relied on Circle of Blue insights and convening, as have businesses, academic leaders, students, and the public. Circle of Blue’s original reportage is cited widely across news media and journals. It is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News and a founding member of the Great Lakes News Collaborative. For creating a systemic approach to impact, its founder received the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award.

About True Elements

True Elements®, an information technology company, is the developer of TrueQi®, the world’s foremost intelligence platform purpose-built for water and environmental data. True Elements creates the deep, clear intelligence about water and climate that leaders need to make more fully informed, effective decisions for the future of their companies, communities, organizations, and portfolios. The company applies sophisticated scientific analysis and patent-pending AI capabilities to multiple layers of disparate watershed data to produce deeper, clearer, and more holistic insights into watershed dynamics — turning these insights into intuitive visualizations and scores that enable more reliable analysis, forecasting, and fully informed decision-making.

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