Codifying nature as infrastructure

There are dozens of examples where natural areas, features, or systems have provided a demonstrable benefit to lives, property and local economies in the same way that completely constructed and engineered infrastructure does. Here are a few:

• Coastal marshes prevented $625 million in damages in the northeastern US during Hurricane Sandy.
• Farm-based water quality protections and forests have saved New York City from a $10 billion cost to construct (and $100M annual bill to maintain) new water filtration plants.
• Natural features, native vegetation, and development site designs that conserve forest cover created thousands of dollars in savings for homeowners in Wisconsin and Illinois studies.

However even though nature or green-infrastructure that is engineered based on lessons from nature has benefits and co-benefits that can match or exceed that of green infrastructure, ways to finance its restoration, installation or management are narrow and constrained, including by historical inertia to keep doing the same thing within agencies and consultancies that are responsible for infrastructure.

In 2016, California took a step in the right direction with a law that defined watersheds as infrastructure and made a set of forest and water restoration practices eligible for financing.

Maryland's state government may soon take that further with legislation - the Conservation Finance Act - that codifies nature, green infrastructure, and blue infrastructure. The bill has support from both its diverse women-led roster of Democratic cosponsors in the state House and Senate, and the administration of Republican Governor Larry Hogan. The Baltimore Business Journal featured the bill in a recent story about scaling up the pace of ecological restoration in the Chesapeake Bay. Here is a quick list of the various provisions in the bill that make nature into a profoundly normal category of infrastructure; the bill:

1. Broadly defines green infrastructure with a focus on natural areas or features and that also includes systems designed to mimic nature. The definition is bigger than the ones used in water programs because areas and features can meet the definition if they do any (not required to do all) of the following: reduce pollution, reduce flooding, reduce erosion, protect from storm surge, or sequester carbon. It's really the first comprehensive climate change-relevant definition for the term yet proposed in law.
2. Creates an aquatic or marine parallel definition for 'blue infrastructure.' This is similarly a first in any state or federal law.
3. Mimics California's provision by defining forest conservation, forest restoration, source watershed protection, and water quality-benefiting green and blue infrastructure as equally eligible for financing as other forms of infrastructure.
4. Identifies nature-focused green infrastructure as a priority for financing through both of the state's revolving loan funds for water.
5. Clarifies the eligibility of green infrastructure and nature under both the Clean Water and Drinking Water revolving loan funds, including through structures like sponsorship programs and loan guarantees.
6. Allows Department of Transportation public-private partnerships (P3s) to be focused on or to include green and blue infrastructure as opposed to just roads and transit.
7. Creates a Green and Blue Infrastructure Policy Advisory Commission to identify ways for the state to expand the scale of such projects and to accelerate the pace of their reviews/approvals for permits.
8. Creates a Task Force on accounting for natural capital, including public auditors and accountants, to make recommendations on how to use new national standards adopted in 2018 by the Government Accounting Standards Board to facilitate more financing and to make recommendations on accounting practices for local government which would incorporate the value of streams and forests into government balance sheets.

Each of these changes are significant steps toward normalizing the way we treat nature and other green and blue infrastructure when it comes to public investment. And most of these actions can be replicated in other states or in federal law and policy.

Policies like these are also needed because nature and green infrastructure get so little financing from traditional infrastructure programs. For example, from 2016-2020 less than 3% of Clean Water State Revolving Fund loans went to various kinds of green infrastructure, nationwide, as described in a new report out from our team and partners today on this financing source.