Photo credit: flickr/ronzzo1A new Fact Sheet on nutrient trading in the Chesapeake Bay region covers issues such as potential costs and revenues, and how farmers and other stakeholders can benefit.
Note: This fact sheet has been updated as a working paper, available here.
Congress is considering proposals to revise and strengthen the Clean Water Act for the Chesapeake Bay region and improve the health of the region’s streams, rivers, and wetlands. Senator Cardin’s and Representative Cummings’s proposed legislation, The Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009, provides significant new resources and tools to help restore the Bay. Water quality trading for nutrients, or “nutrient trading”, is one such tool. It could make it possible to achieve Bay restoration goals faster and at lower cost. It also could create an additional source of revenue for farmers.
Download the PDF (PDF, 6 pages, 331 Kb)
Cy Jones, Senior Fellowcjones@wri.org+1 (202) 729-7899Cy Jones leads the Water Quality Trading Initiative for the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
2 Comments
I find the last statement in
I find the last statement in the scenario descriptions revealing.
'Does not include potential demand from new development'
Why not? Agriculture is shrinking as urban growth is spreading. The use of trading is based on agriculture being able to absorb the demand of growth. How can a shrinking market grow?? What happens to the credits when a farmer decides to grow houses? If you trade acroos the entire watershed, can you leave a river impaired while shifting the cost to another landscape?? Who monitiors the agricultural sector?
The current nutrient trading schemes being proposed will do nothing to mitigate damage to the Chesapeake Bay. Airsheds and watersheds cannot be compared when examing regulations and schemes for mitigation. Regulating non-point sources in exchange with point sources is near impossible without new regulations that would diminish positive economic effects in the agricultural sector. I support using markets to change behaviors but the current trading schemes will not change the nutrient damage and biological impairment in the Chesapeake Bay.
I have two major concerns:
I have two major concerns: (1) nutrient trading is too narrowly focused on the main Bay and not on the whole watershed and (2) focus is only on nutrients and not other issues which may impact natural resources. There is no question that nutrient loading into the main Bay and resulting regions of depleted oxygen is a major concern, but other important issues may be missed and management of these issues might be sacrificed.
The depicted trade-off of agricultural versus stormwater measures would be my greatest concern. Stormwater management responds to a host of environmental stresses (disturbed and damaging flow and temperature regimes, contaminants, sediment, disrupted water supply, loss of biodiversity and fisheries) that are not captured by treating nutrient enrichment in isolation. Agricultural management of nutrients also treats a wider variety of issues as well (basically the same list, but different context). Often these stormwater and related landscape management measures positively impact local conditions (streams, rivers, and sub-estuaries), treat detrimental conditions associated with non-nutrient factors and benefit resources that depend on them. These issues are not captured in the focus on nutrients in the Bay alone.
Stormwater management is directly related to urban-suburban-exurban sprawl and the impacts of sprawl go far beyond nutrient loading. Sprawl often trades farmland or abandoned farmland for development. Compensating for urban nutrients by managing farmland is going to require farmers to either become more efficient at managing nutrients or converting developed land into farms. The former is becoming more difficult for them (please go to http://chesapeakemeetings.com/EBM/presentations.php and click on plenary 3 - Dr. Beegle) and the latter is the antithesis of how sprawl operates. Nutrient trading has a hidden cost/problem /requirement of land-use regulation to operate properly on the larger scale. Land-use regulation is Chesapeake Bay watershed's 800 pount gorilla. The issue of local versus state/federal control of land use and property rights versus societal rights is highly contentious and not easily resolved.
I'm not sure I've captured everything I need to say here, but I hope I've provided a broader perspective.