Over the last year, Bay Program officials have been immersed in setting quantifiable objectives to include in a new Bay agreement. How many acres of wetlands should be restored? How many acres of forest buffers planted? Even how many blue crabs should be in the Bay. But scientists advising the state-federal partnership say agreement writers are on the wrong track.
The Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee is urging that the agreement instead emphasize the conditions the Bay Program wants to achieve — such as better water quality and greater habitat benefits from wetlands — and then monitor whether those changes are happening.
Over the decades, the Bay Program has emphasized quantifiable goals, from a 40 percent nitrogen and phosphorus reduction in the 1987 Bay Agreement, to reducing the rate of harmful sprawl by 30 percent and restoring 114,000 acres of underwater grass beds, which were among the many specific goals in the Chesapeake 2000 agreement.
The new draft Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement continues that trend. It sets a series of broad overarching goals, such as restoring fisheries, vital habitats and water quality. For each goal, it establishes a number of measurable outcomes, such as creating or re-establishing 85,000 acres of wetlands, restoring oyster populations in 10 tributaries, planting 900 miles a year of streamside forests, among about two dozen others. After the new agreement is approved, management strategies would be written to guide how those outcomes would be achieved, and progress would be monitored.
In its comments on the draft agreement, STAC contends that the science generally isn’t available to understand the “right” amount of wetlands, oyster reefs or forest buffers that would be needed to meet overarching goals in the agreement.
“It gives a sense that these numbers somehow represent a completed state,” said Chris Pyke, vice president for research with the US Green Building Council and the former STAC chair. “These numbers are ingested in the Bay process and they become an end in themselves. For me, there is a bit of an aversion to another decade of numbers that guide the show.”
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