Portfolio IV: Coastal Communities

The Issue

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than 15 million people call the Chesapeake watershed home. Clearing land for homes and high-rises, for parking lots and shopping centers has meant a profound change in the Bay's ecosystem - for example changing the way sediments and nutrients enter and move through streams, rivers and the Bay itself.

Coastal communities in the Chesapeake watershed, as elsewhere around the country, face a series of difficult environmental, economic and land use challenges. The control of nonpoint sources of pollution, such as that carried by storm water runoff, has proven particularly difficult, and beyond this unthinking patterns of development have changed the very character of the region's landscape. Efforts aimed at addressing and reversing these trends - such as retrofits for storm water management or controls on nutrient inputs - can prove extremely costly for local communities.

While a great deal of Maryland Sea Grant research has focused on specific ecosystem processes that influence the dynamic behavior of nutrients and contaminants in the estuary, this portfolio deals with the socioeconomic issues that drive human behavior and environmental decision making in the region.

For example, many small communities lack not only the financial resources but the political will and infrastructure to address difficult environmental issues. Such coastal and environmental problems actually contain a matrix of questions and challenges, including:

• How can a community not only balance but move to integrate economic and environmental concerns?
• How does a community determine what constitutes a realistic and desirable vision for its environmental future?
• How can communities best benefit from environmental successes and failures experienced in other places across the country and around the world?
• In what ways can a community best access assistance from local, state, regional and national programs that could potentially offer assistance?

Without answering complex questions such as these, communities often lack the coherent, strategic approach necessary to solve the long-term problems that face them or the potential opportunities that await them. Since long-term restoration of the Chesapeake Bay depends largely on decisions made at the community level - about land use, settlement patterns and natural resource management - empowering those communities to make wise choices becomes a key factor in determining the environmental health of the region.