The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says it will soon save the amount of water it takes to support 3,000 homes in a given year.
This year, the church plans to install 1,800 “smart controllers” at meetinghouses across the West, including in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. The new controllers are irrigation systems, including sprinklers, that adjust water output based on the weather “so that we’re most efficiently watering our plant materials,” said David Wright, landscape architect for the church’s Meetinghouse Facilities Department.
Wright said he estimates the church will save 500 million gallons of water — about 1,534 acre-feet — during the first year the smart controllers are in place. For reference, one acre-foot is about how much water two Utah homes typically use in a year.
The church is one of Utah’s largest and most influential landholders — and water rights holders. A 2023 analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune found the church owns nearly 4,000 parcels within the Great Salt Lake watershed an about 75,000 acre-feet and 600 cubic feet per second of water in the Great Salt Lake Basin.
“This is a topic, caring for the Earth, that we have worked on for a long time,” Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé said in a news release last week. “And so that’s not new, but there’s a new emphasis.”
Smart controllers can save 20% more water than traditional irrigation systems, said Dale Devitt, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and director of the Center for Urban Water Conservation.
“It’s not huge amounts of water, but you want to capture water savings wherever you can get it,” Devitt said.
“What the church is demonstrating here,” he continued, “is that they’re proactive. They’re trying to demonstrate good environmental stewardship, and we’d like to see that everywhere.”
The church said it is saving millions more gallons of water each year with changes to Temple Square in Salt Lake City.
Ground crews are planting more trees and “water-efficient plants,” according to the news release. At the same time, the church is reducing lawn space and the number of flowers it plants each year.
In 2023, the church donated about 20,000 acre-feet of water to the drying Great Salt Lake.
“The Great Salt Lake and the ecosystem that depends on it are so important,” Bishop W. Christopher Waddell — first counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, which oversees the faith’s vast financial, real estate, investment and charitable operations — said at the time. “The church wants to be part of the solution because we all have a responsibility to care for and be good stewards of the natural resources that God has given to us. We invite others to join with us to help.”
Though recent wet winters have boosted Utah’s water supply, the state Department of Natural Resources advises “we are either in drought or preparing for the next one.”
Extreme drought conditions have reappeared in southwestern Utah this winter for the first time since 2023, the state reports, with the worst snowpack in the region since at least 1980.
Snowpack across the Colorado River Basin also is lagging, which affects how much water will run into Lake Powell this spring.
