Alabama Rivers Alliance

Alabama Rivers Alliance is a statewide network of groups working to protect and restore all of Alabama’s water resources through building partnerships, empowering citizens, and advocating for sound water policy and its enforcement.

Alabama has more than 132,000 miles of streams and rivers with more types of plants and animals living in them than any other state in the nation.  However, we also have one of the highest extinction rates in North America, many of which are species that live in our rivers.  Alabama’s precious water resources currently face many threats.  From improper enforcement of environmental regulations to the lack of planning and policy to ensure sustainable water for the future, our community is tasked with protecting the waters of the state for the health of the people and the life therein, or else we risk losing natural treasures that we can never retrieve.

Since its founding, the Alabama Rivers Alliance has worked alongside multiple stakeholders to accomplish multiple shared successes.

• Developed multiple publications focused on watershed health, including reports on the Black Warrior River, Choccolocco Creek, Hatchet Creek and Hurricane Creek.       
• Assisted in building, uniting, and supporting more than 70 grassroots watershed organizations throughout the state. 
• Worked with multiple stakeholders to designate some of Alabama ’s most ecologically significant rivers and streams as “Outstanding Alabama Waters.” 
• Hosted the annual Watershed Leadership Conference to fulfill the goal of “building, supporting, and uniting” grassroots organizations. 
• Working with the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and other partners, formed the Tristate Conservation Coalition to protect downstream and in-stream interests throughout the water negotiations between Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. 
• Helped form the ADEM Reform Coalition in order to forge a reformed state environmental agency that is run “for the people and by the people.” 
• By winning a federal court case, temporarily defeated a permit authorizing the ill-conceived Duck River Dam. 
• Working with the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation, sued Sloss Industries and the US Environmental Protection Agency, which eventually resulted in the largest fine in state history, reduction of pollution, and the upgrade of a stream classification for Five Mile Creek in Jefferson County.  
• Worked with local advocates to defeat a proposal for a jail on Turkey Creek, which resulted in the creation of a park on the creek that will help to protect the endangered Vermillion darter. 
• Working with a coalition throughout Jefferson County , defeated the aptly named, 12-foot diameter “supersewer” that was planned to tunnel under the Cahaba River 15 times. 
• Thanks largely to the assistance of American Rivers, prevailed in a significant federal court case, establishing firmly that the Clean Water Act applies to water releases from hydropower dams. 
• Working with the Friends of the Locust Fork and other partners, protected the Locust Fork River from multiple water supply dam proposals. 
• Implemented an acid mine drainage reclamation project in the Hurricane Creek watershed. 
• Working with the Friends of Hurricane Creek through the state courts, reversed and denied an ill-advised coal-mining permit issued by ADEM in the Hurricane Creek watershed.

We are privately funded and all of our work is accomplished with the financial support of people like you. Please donate today! For more information, visit: www.AlabamaRivers.org