The Metropolitan Water District’s Board of Directors approved $44 million in financial incentives for four water recycling projects Tuesday that will treat and deliver nearly 5.3 billion gallons of water a year, officials announced.

The city of Torrance and Eastern Municipal Water District each will enter an agreement for large-scale recycling projects, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will handle two other projects to use recycled water for irrigation and industrial purposes. MWD will provide as much as $44 million in incentives for the projects over the next 25 years, under the four agreements.

The water will be used by Los Angeles, Torrance, and Perris.

“Every drop of recycled water produced and used makes an equal drop of freshwater available for other uses,” Randy Record, MWD’s chairman, said in a statement. “These types of water management investments and programs are the backbone of the region’s water resource plan that secures our water future by strengthening regional supply reliability and better prepares us to respond to the challenges of climate change.”

Officials said the agreements were the first to receive MWD board approval since the district refined its Local Resources Program in 2014 to include seawater desalination efforts.

Since the program was created in 1982, Metropolitan has provided more than $570 million in incentives to develop more than 2.2 million acre-feet of recycled water and 850,000 acre-feet of recovered groundwater supplies. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, the amount a typical Southland home uses in a year.