Maintain Healthy Watersheds

Develop, promote and achieve sound land use practices which protect watershed resources and water quality, maintain reduced pollutant loadings for the Bay and its tributaries, and restore and preserve aquatic living resources.

What happens on the land has a direct effect on water quality and living resources, especially in the Chesapeake Bay watershed where the land area to water volume ratio is extremely high. While Goals 2 and 3 focus on reducing pollutants from existing land uses and restoring certain ecological functions, this goal addresses prevention of future harm and maintenance of existing ecological functions.

A growing source of nutrient and sediment pollution in the watershed stems from the conversion of existing forest, wetlands, and other resource lands to developed, hardened surfaces and the subsequent disruption of these lands’ natural filtration and absorption capabilities. This problem can be addressed with three key strategy areas: permanent preservation of valuable resource lands that have the greatest value for maintaining water quality and protecting living resources; minimizing the conversion of forests, wetlands, and working farms; and minimizing the disruption of pre-development hydrology during land development. Desired results are described below.

Preserved Valuable Resource Lands

Key resource lands—especially forests and wetlands—are vital to maintaining water quality. For example, forests prevent millions of pounds of nitrogen and other pollutants from reaching the Bay each year. While trends vary locally, the watershed has lost 100 acres of forest land per day since the mid-1980s. Every acre of forest converted to other uses means more nutrients enter the Bay, making it more difficult to mitigate development impacts and resulting in additional loss and fragmentation of forest habitat. If this forest loss continues, nitrogen loads alone will increase by 1,300 pounds per day to the Bay.

Retaining forests across the watershed is a cost-effective strategy for maintaining caps on nutrients in the future. It would be costly to replace with technology the services that forests provide naturally for free, such as drinking water source filtration, flood control, stormwater management, energy conservation, and greenhouse gas and air pollution control.

Strategies for preserving valuable resource lands include: supporting local preservation planning with educational, technical, and financial assistance; protecting lands of national value for conservation and recreation purposes; and providing financial support for state and local land protection.

Minimized Conversion of Forest, Wetlands and Working Farms

Just as it is vitally important to permanently preserve those lands of highest value for maintaining water quality, it is equally important to conserve other resource lands that help maintain healthy watersheds—forests, working farms, and wetlands. These lands allow rain and melting snow to slowly percolate into the ground, filtering the water and replenishing ground water supplies. They reduce the rate and flow of unmanaged stormwater into streams, rivers, and the Bay, and consequently directly reduce in-stream nutrient and sediment levels.

The conversion of these lands to impervious cover—hardened surfaces created during development—is a significant source of increasing nutrient and sediment pollution. Water flows rapidly off impervious surfaces carrying pollutants into streams, rivers, and the Bay. This can be addressed through minimizing the conversion of forests, wetlands, and working farms to developed uses (as well as paying attention to the specific practices of development addressed separately under 4c below).

Strategies for achieving this desired result include: supporting local conservation planning and implementation with educational, technical, and financial assistance; supporting small private forest management and conservation with technical assistance; making effective use of available funding for working forest conservation in Farm Bill programs; and facilitating the development of ecosystems services markets.

Minimize Impacts on Pre-Development Hydrology

The human population in the Chesapeake Bay watershed has more than doubled since 1950, from 8 million to over 16.7 million. The population in the watershed is now growing by 130,000 residents annually. This trend is expected to continue. Between 1990-2000, population increased 8% while impervious cover increased by 41%. This increased imperviousness of the watershed has resulted in increased stormwater runoff, changes to flows in local streams, increased flooding, decreased forest and vital riparian habitat, and increased nutrient and sediment loads to the Chesapeake Bay.

In 2005, members of the Executive Council acknowledged the need to control increasing loads from new development and signed Directive 04-2 “Meeting the Nutrient and Sediment Reduction Goals.” The directive urged the CBP to develop a prevention- and preservation-oriented approach to stormwater and new development, with regulatory and incentive tools to encourage environmentally sensitive development practices that incorporate natural site features into stormwater management.

Strategies for achieving this result include: providing community level nutrient and sediment allocations; strengthening states’ federal regulatory programs (e.g., NPDES and Section 404); strengthening requirements for using federal Clean Water Act state implementation funds to support stormwater reduction; establishing a minimum development impact model and standards; recognizing and certifying minimum impact development; promote design and implementation of green infrastructure; supporting local implementation of codes and ordinances with educational, technical, and financial assistance; implementing minimum impact development in federal projects; and expanding Urban Tree Canopy goals.