This issue brief describes analyses by the World Resources
Institute (WRI) in support of emerging payments for watershed
services (PWS) programs in two major watersheds in Maine and
North Carolina and insights gleaned from work in progress. The
three pilot initiatives discussed represent different approaches to
establishing PWS programs that protect forests and other green
infrastructure elements.
These tables serve as a reference document containing the key design elements of nutrient trading programs in four Chesapeake Bay states: Maryland, Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and West Virginia.
The issue brief provides an overview of how businesses and water utilities in the United States and Latin America are pursuing upstream forest conservation as a cost-effective means of ensuring clean water supplies. It also suggests how many of these approaches could be applicable in the southern United States.
In the Southern United States, the watersheds with the greatest ability to produce
clean water and with the most consumers tend to be the
forested watersheds of the east (top).
Many payments for watershed services share a common
trait: they are investments in “green infrastructure”
instead of “gray infrastructure.” In other words, they are investments
in forests i
This working paper describes the rationale for nutrient trading in the Chesapeake Bay region and estimates the economic benefits, including potential benefits to the agriculture, wastewater, and stormwater sectors.
Lawmakers should consider a suite of policies to reduce harmful algal blooms and dead zones caused by eutrophication–the over-enrichment of nitrogen and phosphorous in freshwater and coastal ecosystems.
In the 1980s, Thailand’s government, initially supported by the World Bank, focused on a single ecosystem service—aquaculture—to supply a growing frozen shrimp export industry.
Greater meat consumption and demand for fossil fuels worldwide are expected to cause increasingly more harmful algal blooms and dead zones in coastal and freshwater areas.
Uganda’s leaders now have access to maps that will allow them—for the first time ever—to reduce poverty through better management of the country’s wetlands.
Click on map to see where WRI is making a difference.