The Virginia Annual Water Resources Report (Annual Report) is submitted in October of each year to the Governor and the Virginia General Assembly in accordance with § 62.1-44.40 of the Code of Virginia. The Annual Report focuses on water quantity and supply, summarizing reported water withdrawals for the 2021 calendar year, identifying water withdrawal trends, and providing an update on the Commonwealth’s water resources management activities. Where applicable, the Annual Report also serves as a status report on activities associated with the State Water Resources Plan between five year updates. The 2020 State Water Resources Plan was released in January 2022 after completing an extensive public comment and stakeholder outreach process.

Water quality issues are addressed in the most recent biennial Water Quality Assessment Integrated Report, published by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).

Chapter 1 provides an overview of water resource management activities and outcomes during 2021. This chapter discusses several DEQ programs including water withdrawal permitting and compliance, water supply planning and analysis, groundwater characterization and monitoring, surface water investigations, and drought assessment and response.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview on how withdrawals are reported to DEQ, summarizes 2021 reported water withdrawals at the statewide level for all water use types, and compares 2021 reported withdrawals to average use over the past 5 years.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of water withdrawal reporting for the year 2021, as well as comparisons to reporting in recent years, for each of the following water withdrawal use categories: public water supply, commercial, manufacturing, power generation, mining, agriculture, and irrigation.

Chapter 4 identifies new, continuing, and future priorities, challenges, or other topics of specific interest for DEQ. These include updates on new legislative or regulatory actions, programmatic goals and achievements, and other items.

In addition to the main chapters, the report includes several appendices that provide: the top 20 largest reported withdrawals in 2021 (Appendix 1), reported use by locality (Appendix 2), an overview of Virginia’s water resources and climatic conditions by the numbers (Appendix 3), and some additional information on water transfers (Appendix 4).