Mapping Environmental Justice and Water Quality in Baltimore County

A first of its kind assessment model empowers a municipality to explicitly examine the relationship between water quality and watershed planning, and environmental justice communities.

In crafting and signing the Baltimore Watershed Agreement, Baltimore City and County solidified their joint commitment to improve water quality in their shared watersheds. Soon afterwards, Biohabitats helped both entities to develop a Phase I Action Plan to begin working toward this goal. Because environmental justice (EJ) emerged as a critical, cross-cutting theme for proposed watershed planning and water quality actions, the final Action Plan required the County and City to jointly “ensure environmental justice indicators are taken into consideration during major planning efforts.”

To address this requirement, Biohabitats prepared a white paper on environmental justice indicators and assessment methods, interviewed local experts, and reviewed peer programs to evaluate linkages between EJ and clean water at the community, state, and local government levels. Few sources explicitly use a defined set of indicators to track EJ in the context of watershed planning and water quality, so it became clear that there was a need to further explore and develop a set of indicators that could. Biohabitats created an assessment methodology to integrate EJ principles into watershed planning. The methodology uses GIS to layer relevant EJ and watershed health indicator data, including demographic characteristics and human and watershed health indicators.

Initial results highlighted several subwatersheds where communities are at risk for EJ issues associated with water quality. Resulting maps and associated report informed the County’s small watershed action plans, as well as other watershed planning efforts, to prioritize projects in neighborhoods with environmental injustice and poor water quality.

TAGS

• Analysis+Planning
• Assessment+Monitoring
• Conservation
• Ecological Restoration