Development of a Decision Support System for Environmental Compliance in Virginia's Nutrient Credit Exchange
Abstract
The Virginia Nutrient Credit Exchange (The Exchange) is a policy initiative designed to help achieve the water quality standards outlined in the Clean Water Act by establishing a market for nutrient offset credits. The Exchange includes provisions that permit credit trading between agricultural entities and organizations responsible for construction projects. Such transactions have dominated The Exchange and are increasingly frequent. Nutrient credits are created when the amount of nutrient runoff from agriculture is reduced and the reduction is quantified using the Chesapeake Bay Model. Resulting credits may only be sold to construction projects located within scientifically-guided spatial restrictions, so achieving compliance for a transaction requires spatial analysis to identify the restrictions for a given project site. Procedures to complete this analysis vary across market participants, and regulators are not equipped with resources to review the validity of each transaction. Variable or absent spatial analysis procedures for transactions make the environmental outcomes of The Exchange unclear. We present a Decision Support System (DSS) to automate transaction compliance for The Exchange. Our DSS includes web apps that provide project-specific spatial information and identify banks within spatial restrictions. The DSS is developed using ESRI's ArcGIS Online, WebApp Builder, and Survey 123 (a data collection and analysis software toolbox). We also seek to classify Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) implementation plans by relevance to trading restrictions in The Exchange. Environmental compliance managers at the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) have supported and collaborated on this research and will implement our DSS for all VDOT nutrient credit purchases statewide in October, 2018. We are working with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make a similar DSS available to any potential nutrient credit buyer. Our proposed system will simplify implementation of The Exchange, enable improved compliance verification, and optimize use of regulatory resources.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H51X1668S
- Keywords:
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- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 6324 Legislation and regulations;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6344 System operation and management;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES