Editor’s note: This commentary is by Gaye Symington, who leads The High Meadows Fund. She is a former Democratic speaker of the Vermont House.
As the snow melts and drains through our forests and into our waterways in the coming months, now is a good time of year to think about Vermont’s watersheds and why they matter. The rushing waters highlight that watershed-level planning should be emphasized in the Global Warming Solutions Act that’s now taking shape in the Statehouse.
A watershed, also called a drainage basin, is an area of land that drains all of its rain, stormwater, and snow into the same water body. Vermont’s watersheds often span multiple towns and even cross state and national borders. Thinking like a watershed means knowing where the stormwater (and snow melt) on your property and in your town comes from, and where it all ends up.
As heavy rainfall events become more common in a warming climate, this kind of thinking will be critical in protecting vulnerable Vermonters. Climate-induced storms and flooding are putting our homes, farms, downtowns, roads, and water quality at risk. Preventing future flooding means more than just fixing and improving infrastructure on our most flood-prone land – it also requires new infrastructure and healthy, absorbent soils throughout the rest of our watersheds. For example, a new culvert or riparian buffer in one town could mean saving thousands of dollars in flooding damage in a neighboring town during the next storm.
This thinking is central to the work of Vermont’s watershed groups. In the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, these groups have brought together neighboring towns to build watershed identity and prioritize infrastructure projects that offer the greatest benefits for every member of their watershed.
Five years into a grant initiative to support and learn from watershed resilience activity, the High Meadows Fund’s most important takeaway: developing new relationships across town borders takes time and hard work, but it’s worth it. Vermont has a long tradition of making land use decisions at the municipal level, but lacks groundwork for decision-making processes that include neighboring towns. Regional Planning Commissions can play this role, but are constrained by county boundaries, not watersheds, and work at a much larger geographic scale. This makes watershed groups best positioned to bring towns and residents together to protect their watersheds.
Uniting towns along waterways requires more than just flyers and Facebook posts – it requires meeting people where they already are, and making it a priority to listen to what they have to say before deciding what action steps should come first or who needs to change how they use their land. On the ground, this work can include listening to and celebrating local road crews, cooking up tasty communal meals, or providing child care for working parents during community meetings. Without this community building work, towns are much less likely to work together and take a watershed approach to issues of flooding and water quality.
It is with this important learning in mind that we raise a concern with the Global Warming Solutions Act (H.462), passed by the Vermont House, now moving to the Senate. The bill primarily aims to turn Vermont’s carbon emission reduction goals into requirements, to advance them with greater urgency. Even if Vermont meets these emissions requirements, we (and the rest of the world) will continue to emit carbon for at least another 30 years, virtually guaranteeing more warming and more severe weather events. This means efforts to reduce emissions have to be coupled with efforts (and financial resources) to protect Vermont’s vulnerable communities and ecosystems.
The Global Warming Solutions Act does include language about resilience. It would include resilience expertise in a newly formed Climate Council. The council’s subcommittee on rural resilience and adaptation would be charged with developing vulnerability indicators, assessment tools, and best practices for building flood resilience – all at the municipal level.
These tools will play an important role in addressing stormwater issues in Vermont’s communities. But, we have seen firsthand that, on the ground, this work is most effective when planning and outreach extend beyond town borders and communities unite around their shared waterways. Vermont’s watershed groups have demonstrated this all across the state, but that work requires dedicated staff time and long-term planning, while many of these groups are volunteer-led and rely on project-specific grant funding, leaving few resources that allow for cross-town connectivity.
As the state crunches the numbers on which investments will yield the most measurably cost-effective and expedient climate adaptation, watershed groups may not appear to embody the same urgency that undergirds the Global Warming Solutions Act. But, it is precisely because these groups are not allowing urgency to undermine an inclusive, collaborative planning process that they are such a key partner in building an equitable and just climate plan for Vermont.
