The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is working to complete a water conservation project in 2025 that will enable the Church to save an estimated 500 million gallons of water in its first full year of implementation.
The project — which involves installing smart irrigation controllers in more than 3,000 meetinghouses across six states in the western United States — is one of several projects the Church is undertaking to conserve water at its properties worldwide, following President Russell M. Nelson’s prophetic counsel to care for God’s children and be wise stewards over the Lord’s divine creations.
Said Bishop Gérald Caussé in a recent Church Newsroom report: “As members of the Church, we are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ and we live the gospel, and part of the gospel is to care for the community in which we live.”
Read below to learn about how the Church is accelerating its water conservation efforts in the western United States, including at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.
Conserving water in the western United States
As part of its environmental stewardship efforts in the western United States, the Church is planning to install nearly 1,800 smart irrigation controllers in meetinghouses across Idaho, Utah and Arizona and parts of Nevada, Wyoming and Montana in 2025 — having already installed approximately 1,300 systems.
“The smart controllers are able to adjust for the weather, so it ends up saving a lot of water that otherwise wouldn’t be saved when you’re doing manual adjustments on the controller,” said Andrew Stringfellow, Intermountain Facilities Services landscape manager.
The Church reported that, unlike traditional landscape controllers, smart controllers use cellular connection to monitor weather conditions, make daily adjustments and optimize irrigation timing based on existing and forecasted weather conditions. This optimization enables the Church to water its plants and grounds more sustainably.
“When properly maintained and adjusted, it’s very easy to get them [smart controllers] at 20% consumption savings over what a traditional controller would use,” said David Wright, landscape architect in the Church’s Meetinghouse Facilities Department.
According to the report, the smart controllers also enable water managers to adjust irrigation systems remotely, increasing the systems’ convenience and efficiency.
At Temple Square in Salt Lake City, ground crews are implementing the use of smart controllers in combination with waterwise landscaping as part of the grounds’ ongoing renovations.
Specific settings on the smart controllers are available for turf, flowers and trees, said Scott Karpowitz, irrigation supervisor of Headquarters Facilities. “Everything has its own settings and its own parameters to give those plants the water that they need because quite often they’re different.”
The Church’s waterwise landscaping efforts on Temple Square have included planting 30% more trees, removing 35% of the landscape’s turf grass, adding more water-efficient plants to the flower beds and reducing the annual number of flowers and plants used in landscaping by 30%.
In a recent interview with the Church News, Jenica Sedgwick — the Church’s sustainability manager who operates under the direction of the Presiding Bishopric — offered insight into the Church’s focus to conserve water on Temple Square and the western United States.
She said the Church’s water conservation efforts are based on a region’s ecological needs and resources, thus bringing the Church to focus its efforts in the arid regions of the western United States and other drought-prone areas in Latin America, the Pacific and Southern Africa.
“It’s not just conserving water for conservation’s sake,” she said. “This is about being aware of our environment, aware of our water availability and aligning what we [the Church] do to that ecological context.”
According to Sedgwick, the Church’s water conservation efforts form one of several priorities the Church has adopted under the First Presidency’s approval to integrate the principle of environmental stewardship in its wide range of operations. Listen to learn more about what the Church is doing to honor its sacred responsibility to care for the earth in this episode of the Church News podcast.
