Stream restoration Design Choices Drive Green House Gas Emissions and Long-term Project Benefits
Joe Berg
Chris Streb
Biohabitats
Baltimore, MD
Stream restoration can be a significant opportunity for improvement of natural resources, including restoring lost floodplain function, enhancing wetland hydrology, diversifying degraded instream conditions, water quality enhancements, and increased density and diversity of aquatic life, amphibians, and bird resources. In addition, stream restoration can deliver improvements for flood reductions, property and infrastructure protection, improved recreational opportunities, as well as a variety of broader benefits (forestry support, aesthetic benefits, etc.). While our design approaches have become more inclusive and optimized for the range of conditions that our restoration projects occur in, we need to continue to broaden our appreciation for the cultural context in which our work is performed. Specifically, a single moderately sized stream restoration project relying on imported rock, transported over highways in large numbers of truck trips, results in carbon emissions greater than what many small businesses produce in a year. I think most practitioners are not aware of how their design choices can result in projects that are net emitters of Carbon and may never deliver system benefits sufficient to offset their initial carbon emissions. While we are more accustomed to consider the long-term restoration benefits to the natural resources of the site against the construction-phase resource impacts, not many of us think about the carbon emissions and whether our restoration projects will ever sequester more carbon than was emitted during construction. This analysis has been conducted on several of Biohabitats projects with wildly differing results, strongly demonstrating that our design decisions dramatically influence the individual long-term project benefits. By sharing this information, we hope to help the stream restoration community to make positive design choices that result in better, long-term projects.
About Joe Berg
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About Chris Streb
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