IWR and The Nature Conservancy Meet to Discuss Sustainable Rivers Project

ALEXANDRIA, VA — February 26, 2009. Recently, senior staff from The Nature Conservancy’s Global Freshwater Team visited IWR to discuss expanding the collaboration between the two groups.

The Nature Conservancy is interested in expanding the Sustainable Rivers Project (SRP). There was agreement that the program to date has been very successful. TNC has identified more than 600 TNC sites that are downstream of a hydropower dam and believes that, with sufficient funding, the Sustainable Rivers Project could be greatly expanded. This work would involve TNC freshwater staff, IWR, and district offices in a broad collaboration.

Related to the expansion of Sustainable Rivers Project sites, The Nature Conservancy has suggested that the many reservoirs under the Corps authority could be used to reconnect rivers and floodplains. TNC’s Brian Richter describes it as follows:

“Conceptually, our proposed solution is simple. Most dams include storage for flood waters but are designed to serve other purposes as well, including hydropower, water supply, and environmental flow releases. If the reservoir volume presently allocated to flood control could be reduced or eliminated, this volume could be re-allocated to these other purposes. We hypothesize that the need for flood-control storage in reservoirs can be substantially reduced by restoring the flood-storing capacity of floodplains – by removing or setting back levees, negotiating flood easements on agricultural lands, etc. In addition to restoring ecologically critical river flows and connectivity to floodplains, this approach is also a potentially powerful climate-adaptation strategy because it can buffer the effects of increased flood and drought and enable increased use of clean energy (hydropower). Such re-allocation could generate substantial new funding from additional hydropower or water-supply revenues to fund extensive floodplain restoration.”

TNC is currently working with the Hydrologic Engineering Center and the Savannah District on a pilot reallocation project, but they are interested in investigating how this reallocation strategy might be more broadly applied across the U.S. and beyond, and how IWR might be able to facilitate this work. John Hickey represents the Hydrologic Engineering Center in this effort, and Jason Ward represents the Savannah District.

A proposal was made that completed Sustainable Rivers Project work be developed into a collection of case studies for publication in a water resources journal. The idea was widely supported and will be discussed further, with possible action at the next meeting.

TNC asked IWR to help identify how products developed under TNC’s ecoregional planning might be made more useful to the Corps, especially district or division offices. TNC and IWR also discussed how Shared Vision Planning could be more formally and routinely adopted in TNC conservation, planning, and other activities (where appropriate).

More about the Partnership

The Sustainable Rivers Projects is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and The Nature Conservancy partnership. It represents an ongoing effort to re-operate Corps dams to achieve more ecologically sustainable flows, while maintaining or enhancing project benefits. The project is being carried out under a Memorandum of Understanding between the Corps and the Conservancy.

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