Posted February 25, 2014
A coalition of government officials and environmental
advocacy groups have created a national
network on water quality trading in an effort to show how water quality can
be improved at a lower cost through market-based approaches, according to a
Bloomberg BNA article available here.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s water quality
trading program is “essentially a cap-and-trade program, with the total maximum
daily load allocation for nonpoint and point sources serving as the cap against
which various sources trade pollutant credits.
These allocations are then incorporated in to NPDES permits for point
sources.”
The trading program allows “point source dischargers
such as publically owned water facilities or power plants to pay nonpoint
sources such as farm operations to reduce certain pollutants such as nitrogen
and phosphorus.”
While there are several trading programs at the state
and local levels, the “national network will provide a single forum for
consolidating principles and practices of trading programs that worked and lessons
from programs that failed.”
Alexandra Dunn, executive director for the Association
of Clean Water Administrators, said that her group signed onto the network
because “we want to expose our regulators to as much information about
successful trading as we can as well as provide them with opportunities to
learn from unsuccessful efforts.”
For more information on the Clean Water Act, please
visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
