Making waves
In a watershed the size of the Delaware River’s, which drains nearly 14,000 square miles of land from parts of Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, a single project that aims to conserve and enhance the natural resources people and wildlife depend upon may seem like a drop in the bucket.
But what about 24 projects? Followed by 29 the next year? And 37 more the next?
And what if those 90 projects (and counting) weren’t just accumulating benefits in one location, like in a bucket, but spreading them throughout a region, like ripples moving across the surface of the water.
That’s the vision behind the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund, a competitive grant program administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Launched in 2018, the Fund is a mechanism for achieving the goals of the 2016 Delaware River Basin Conservation Act. The Act empowered federal, state, regional and local partners to envision a sustainable future for people and wildlife in the Delaware River watershed, and to identify, prioritize, and implement projects that could make that future a reality.
On Wednesday, September 9, the Service announced the third cohort of grantees for the fund: 37 partners who will use the collective $8 million available through the fund, combined with an astounding $22 million in matching funds, to enhance water quality, water management, wildlife habitat, and recreational access across the region.
Because all of the projects are conceived within a shared, strategic framework developed by watershed partners, they add up to long-term conservation benefits for human and natural communities that are significantly greater than the sum of their parts — way more than would fit in a bucket.
But partners also recognize there are entrenched barriers that prevent some communities from benefiting from the positive ripple effects from these projects, and from participating in conversations about protecting the natural resources where they live.
That’s why increasingly, investments from the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund are focusing on breaking down these barriers both within conservation organizations, and in the projects they support. This year’s cohort includes initiatives to foster equity, justice, and cultural competency across a network of partners in watershed communities, as well as projects that help address racial and economic disparities in access to nature.
One project led by National Wildlife Federation is using the Service’s Urban Wildlife Conservation Program’s Standards of Excellence as a framework for engaging ethnically diverse urban communities in issues of watershed access, importantly, by making space for residents to shape what that should mean, look and feel like.
Another, led by the John Bartram Association, supports a paid internship program that empowers local students to be stewards of their watershed by helping to run a community boating program, and conduct water-quality monitoring on a stretch of the Schuylkill River featuring Philadelphia’s only natural tidal wetlands.
Just up the river, another grantee will focus on providing better access to the Schuylkill, a tributary to the Delaware. The Schuylkill River Development Corporation will rehabilitate a dilapidated pier and adjacent riverbank to transform it into an ADA-accessible fishing pier, and work with community leaders on a plan for site stewardship to ensure management reflects local needs and values, and for promotion to ensure the area is perceived as a welcoming place. That project will also have positive downstream impacts, reducing runoff and erosion, improving water quality, enhancing wetland habitat — adding to the collective flow of benefits these projects feed into.
Three years into the grant program, we have tremendous momentum. Together with the grantees from 2018 and 2019, the new cohort will contribute to a total of 80 miles of restored streams, 894 acres of restored wetlands, 4,683 acres with new or improved public access, and much more.
Ultimately, however, success will be measured in the improved lives of future generations who have greater access to their watershed, cleaner water to drink, more wildlife to observe along their river, and better career opportunities in fields that support and are supported by a healthy, functioning Delaware River.
This fall, we will share stories highlighting a selection of grant projects that are moving us toward this vision of success in the watershed — by making ripples, and making waves.
