A Darker Shade of Green: Coming to Grips with Technical and Societal Limitations in Ecosystem Management

As managers struggle to keep pace with costs, inefficiencies, logistical constraints and maintenance burdens of active management approaches including green practices, environmental outcomes become less certain, and recovery potential diminished. Natural Assets provide foundational structural and functional capital that sustains ecosystem benefits reliably and cost-effectively and have the innate ability to adaptively transform to a changing environment. These ecosystem attributes if proactively conserved and managed can contribute significantly to healthy watershed goals not often considered in current watershed management strategies.

Natural Assets are easily quantified using natural-cover indicators such as forests and wetlands. They provide a surrogate measure of watershed "solvency" - the capacity for watersheds to meet and sustain collective environmental and human needs and objectives. I paired a Watershed Condition Index (WCI) with a Buffer Condition Index (BCI) to assess and balance natural watershed cover (prevention) and buffer cover (mitigation) to attain a compensatory balance that meets management objectives. In short, less forested watersheds need wider buffers, and compromised buffers need to be widened to increase treatment capacity. The WCI and BCI provide simple and salient indicators for planning and management that empower municipal stakeholders and policymakers to attain more sustainable water quality outcomes. This darker shade of green management is actionable, more cost-effective and adaptable to the local environmental and socio-economic context.

Proof-of-concept was tested using UConn's Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) land cover data for 160 sub-watersheds in 36 coastal CT towns. A user-friendly, scalable Decision-Support Framework (DSF) balances WCI and BCI for multiple, user-defined watershed management scenarios and tailors buffer widths along a continuum of protection levels. I also propose a conceptual blockchain application to simply manage combined real property and natural assets to incentivize all property owners to maximize natural cover to reduce tax burden. This will also facilitate trading of excess Natural Asset credits to equitably and fairly distribute management costs and responsibility for any scale or domain.