San Diego Coastkeeper

San Diego Coastkeeper's vision is that the organization is a major force in transforming the San Diego region into a leader in sustainable water management, guided by an engaged and informed public and protective of a healthy environment that supports high biodiversity, resilient ecosystems, and thriving communities. Our 2022 - 2024 strategic plan outlines our five main goals:

1. Protect clean water
2. Advance a climate-smart water supply for San Diego
3. Engage and activate the public to protect clean water
4. Be the clean water voice for San Diego
5. Make equity, justice, and inclusion a core part of San Diego Coastkeeper

San Diego Coastkeeper uses a multi-pronged approach to achieve clean water, strategically combining education, community engagement, outreach, science, and advocacy. Our programs and campaigns tackle persistent and emerging threats to water quality, water supply, and ecosystem health and meet the needs of our diverse communities.

San Diego Coastkeeper strategies to achieve our five main goals in our strategic plan include:
1. Strengthen water quality protections against pollution and ecosystem degradation and advance climate resilience and adaptation.
2. Ensure a resilient, multi-benefit, climate-smart water supply that supports a water secure future in San Diego.
3. Educate the community on achieving and protecting a clean, sustainable water supply and use, and increase
environmental and science literacy in San Diego.
4. Maintain and amplify our effective, influential voice for clean water in our region.
5. Build and strengthen equity, justice, and inclusion into our internal and external organizational policies and programs.

San Diego Coastkeeper’s small team of eight staff members represent experts in education, strategic outreach, environmental science, program development, community organizing, and advocacy. Our board of directors is a highly involved and supportive board, whose eleven members bring a great deal to the organization and represent various communities across our region. We have over 27 years of experience protecting our local watersheds and fighting for clean water through our successful education, outreach, community engagement, science, and advocacy programs and campaigns.

Our strategic, multi-faceted approach to our region’s most pressing pollution, degradation, and water scarcity issues has yielded powerful success stories across all our program areas.

Our work with the City of San Diego to improve its sewage infrastructure has resulted in a 90 percent reduction in sewage spills and a 77 percent decrease in beach advisories across the county. These efforts enable San Diegans and visitors to enjoy more days in the water without risking their health or well-being. Our cleanup program has engaged tens of thousands of volunteers at more than 650 beach and neighborhood cleanups, resulting in the removal of hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash from our beaches, canyons, and neighborhoods. From 2008 to 2018, we ran California’s largest volunteer-based water quality monitoring program. We trained more than 1,500 community scientists to monitor the health of the county’s rivers and streams. Through this program, we created a community of informed individuals empowered with knowledge and hands-on experience to advocate for our most overlooked rivers and streams. Working to preserve our coastal habitats and marine life, we successfully advocated to establish state-level protections for 15 percent of Southern California coastal waters in ecologically important marine protected areas, implemented in 2012. Since 2003, we have provided our standards-aligned, hands-on water and climate science education programs to grade K-12. We have educated more than 16,000 students and nearly 600 teachers over the last five years alone. Furthermore, after working with the City of San Diego for 15 years on efforts to develop and implement a wastewater recycling program called Pure Water, in 2014 we were successful in securing a cooperative agreement for the largest such recycling program of its kind in the United States, which will reduce treated sewage discharges to the ocean and generate climate-smart local water supply that meets a third of the current drinking water demand.