Texas’ continued growth depends on water. Over the coming decades, millions of new residents and expanding industries, from agriculture and energy to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence, will place unprecedented demands on the state’s water resources. Yet Texas is approaching this challenge with legal, regulatory, and planning systems built for a bygone era.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is launching Texas Water 2050, a major, longterm initiative to ensure water supports, rather than constrains, the next era of Texas growth. TPPF will advance reforms that modernize how Texas governs, values, moves, and develops water while protecting private property rights, unlocking markets and private investment, expanding new supply, and positioning Texas as a global leader in water innovation. With Texas preparing to deploy $20 billion for water infrastructure and consequential policy decisions approaching in the 90th, 91st, and 92nd Texas Legislatures, the window to shape the state’s water future is now.

Transformational reform rarely happens in a single legislative session. Just as TPPF remained committed to education freedom through a 36-year fight, Texas Water 2050 is built for the long term, with the institutional commitment to pursue water reform across legislative sessions, political cycles, and setbacks.

The Challenge: Securing Texas’ Water Future

For decades, Texas water policy has focused on managing scarcity: planning for drought, allocating limited resources, financing projects, and responding to emergencies. That framework helped Texas navigate earlier periods of growth, but it is mismatched to the scale and complexity of the challenges ahead.

By 2070, Texas’ population is projected to increase 73 percent to 51.5 million, while existing water supplies decline by roughly 18 percent. Under drought-of-record conditions, annual shortages could reach 6.9 million acre-feet. The consequences extend far beyond household water use. Reliable water is essential to agriculture, energy, manufacturing, technology, and other industries that power Texas’ $2.9 trillion economy. The Texas Water Development Board estimates that failure to implement needed water strategies could result in $153 billion in economic losses during a severe drought.

Texas has extensive surface water, major aquifers, vast brackish groundwater reserves, and regions where supplies exceed projected demand. The deeper challenge is a fragmented system that makes it difficult to move water where it is needed, develop new supplies, and attract investment. Surface water and groundwater operate under different ownership systems; groundwater is regulated through nearly 100 conservation districts, often based on political rather than hydrological boundaries; and statewide planning is divided among 16 regional groups. Legal barriers inhibit voluntary transfers, aging infrastructure loses enormous volumes of treated water, and emerging technologies are advancing faster than the policy frameworks necessary to deploy them at scale.

Texas has begun making an extraordinary financial commitment to securing its water future. Recent legislative action and voter approval authorized $20 billion over 20 years for water infrastructure. But capital alone cannot modernize groundwater governance, create functioning water markets, remove barriers to moving water, accelerate permitting, or ensure that public investments generate the greatest possible return. Without structural reform, Texas risks spending billions of dollars within a broken system.

Texas faces a choice: continue managing an increasingly severe scarcity problem within institutions designed for the past, or modernize those institutions and build a future of water abundance.

The Vision: From Scarcity to Abundance

TPPF proposes a different approach: replace the management of scarcity with a strategy for abundance. Texas should become the national, and ultimately global, leader in water abundance. The state should build a system capable of providing reliable, affordable water for families, farms, communities, and businesses for generations to come, while protecting private property rights and harnessing markets, private investment, and technological innovation.

Achieving that vision will require modernization of how Texas water is governed, valued, transferred, and developed. TPPF envisions a future defined by:

  • A modernized water system: Create consistent, streamlined, and predictable rules that better align water management with hydrological realities while strengthening the private property rights of Texas landowners.
  • Functioning water markets: Remove barriers to voluntary exchange so water can move more efficiently from regions of surplus to regions of need, while protecting landowners’ groundwater rights, addressing impacts on those who share an aquifer, and creating incentives for conservation and private investment.
  • New water at scale: Accelerate desalination, produced-water reuse, aquifer storage and recharge, and other technologies capable of adding significant new supplies rather than simply reallocating existing water.
  • Faster infrastructure and greater innovation: Create a policy environment that allows private capital, entrepreneurs, engineers, and emerging technologies to develop, finance, and deploy new water solutions more quickly and affordably.
  • A drought-resilient Texas: Build a water system capable of supporting continued population and economic growth even through severe drought, reducing the need for emergency rationing, costly curtailments, and other crisis responses.

The ultimate measure of success is simple: no family, farm, or business should decide against coming to Texas, or be forced to leave, for want of water.