New Report: Clean Water Act - Priorities for Offset Policies

We’ve been hearing about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) for so many months now that it’s easy to forget the incredible scale of impact it will have. One trillion dollars is going into highways, public transit, bridges, ports, dams - all to be spent in a timeframe of five years. Here’s a map released in May of the 4,300 projects already under construction, but that’s only spending a fraction of the total fund. Now imagine 10x more dots on that map. It is a MASSIVE scale of development.

Credit: GSA

This development will inevitably have an impact on our nation’s waters.

Credit: Nelson Minar, US rivers in the contiguous 48, CC-BY-SA 2.0

We could minimize those impacts by creating a federal advanced mitigation fund for water quality to help plan for compensatory mitigation needs over the long term. What would this do? It would ensure that CWA-required mitigation would be in place in advance of impacts. There would be no gap between the impact of a project and the time it takes for a restoration project to fully provide services and functions like improving water quality, reducing the impacts of flooding, and - this just in - protecting our respiratory health. We could also incentivize the removal of hazardous dams and use some of those BIL funds for the good of the environment and communities. 

These ideas are a sample of many immediate and long-term recommendations in our new report. Mitigation programs developed under the Clean Water Act are some of the most robust in the US and in the world. However, more clarity is needed to provide project developers the certainty they need regarding when and how credits will be recognized, where projects should be prioritized and that incentives will support a market for credit demand. A durable WOTUS definition, more robust water quality trading guidance and specific guidance for dam removals will all support the expansion of a market for buyers and sellers of mitigation credits. If implemented, these recommendations will ultimately ensure fewer impacts go unmitigated, and that high quality offsets are developed in advance of impacts.