“Water quality trading (WQT) is an approach that offers greater efficiency in achieving water quality goals on a watershed basis,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a 2003 policy.
Now, EPA is trying to give WQT a jump-start: Last week, the agency’s top water official, David Ross, told EPA regional administrators in a publicly released memo that EPA wants to move toward more market-based solutions to nutrient pollution — water quality trading in particular.
“The new guidance is certainly helpful in many ways that will help with certainty.” “We’re happy to see that EPA is throwing support behind water quality trading,” said Kristiana Teige Witherill, Clean Water Project Manager at the Willamette Partnership in Oregon and the lead on strategy development and facilitation for the National Network on Water Quality Trading.
“A lot of times it may be cheaper (for dischargers) to work with farmers and landowners in the watershed to do a conservation practice” than pay for improvements to their own treatment facilities, said Larry Antosch, Ohio Farm Bureau’s senior director for policy development and environmental policy.
The program mostly uses models to measure reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus, but also has a couple of in stream monitors, Fox said, emphasizing the "rigor" of the program.
Water quality trading definitely has critics, however.
“We call it water pollution trading,” said Scott Edwards, co-director of the group’s Food & Water Justice project.
Environmental groups raise other issues, such as the use of modeling to measure water quality improvements.
The Mississippi River watershed, however, takes in all or parts of 32 states.
Reed, for example, says C-AGG has been working for nearly two years to develop an Ecosystem Services Market Program.