2021: A Year of Amazing Progress Toward a Resilient Virginia

Snapshot: Wetlands Watch spent much of 2021 working to nail down the significant initiatives made in the last half of Governor Northam’s Administration. This work involved countless hours of attending meetings, conducting research, developing networks, and following every detail of legislative and regulatory deliberations. The end result? Virginia now has one of the strongest set of policies to address climate change and resilience.

Backstory: Starting in 2020, the General Assembly began enacting long-overdue legislation to address the challenges Virginia faces from sea level rise, increased flooding, and other climate change impacts.

Coastal Master Plan - Virginia needed a strategy to guide its coastal resilience efforts and began in 2020 with the release of a Coastal Master Planning Framework, outlining what the state strategy should look like. Over the course of the next year, the state contracted to develop the Plan itself, which was released at the end of 2021. Wetlands Watch was asked to be on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Plan and devoted considerable time and effort to overseeing the process. The Virginia Coastal Master Plan is just a start: the plan needs to include updated rainfall intensity data and be expanded statewide. But for now, Virginia joins just a few states with a Coastal Strategy.

Community Flood Preparedness Fund - For most of Virginia’s localities, starting to work on climate change impacts is a big lift. Most localities do not have the plans, data, capacity, or funding to deal with the impacts they are seeing. In 2020, Virginia joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon credit auction in the Northeastern US, and devoted 45% of the funds raised to a new Community Flood Preparedness Fund. This Fund provides funding to localities to plan for and develop project proposals and then cost-shares with localities to actually build them.

Wetlands Watch was deeply involved in setting up this fund and celebrated when the first round of funds were awarded in 2021. With over $102 million raised this year in the Fund, there is more work to be done.

Tidal Wetlands Law - In 2020, the General Assembly enacted legislation that required the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) to develop standards for wetlands permitting that took climate change and sea level rise into account. In 2021, VMRC worked to develop these standards and Wetlands Watch was deeply involved. In the end, the standards looked good but we will be working to insure that they are implemented properly. We also worked to insure they are coordinated with the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act….

Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act - In 2020 as well, the General Assembly required the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to develop regulations that included “coastal resilience and adaptation to sea-level rise and climate change.” Wetlands Watch was also involved in the development of those regulations in 2021 and support efforts to coordinate these regulations with the Tidal Wetlands Act changes.

Septic Regulations to Include Climate Change - In 2021, the General Assembly passed legislation that would require the Virginia Department of Health to include climate change in its regulations on the siting and construction of septic systems. Implementation of these changes has just begun and will take most of 2022 to implement these first-in-the-nation provisions.

With these advances, and others - like Virginia Department of Transportation revisions to engineering standards - Virginia has set the standard to climate change adaptation in the Nation. However, Virginia has constitutional limitations that impede continuation of this progress and already the next Governor has signaled he may not stay on the course that has been set in the last two years.