New York City’s water system is a marvel of engineering, with 19 reservoirs and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that provide clean drinking water to nearly 10 million people. However, the foundation of this system is hundreds of thousands of acres of forests, wetlands, rivers, streams, and carefully managed farms in the Catskills Mountains north of the city. New York City had long understood the relationship between healthy land and clean water, but in the 1990s faced a choice when new drinking water standards required all municipal drinking water systems to have physical filtration. Rather than build a filtration plant and incur the significant expense, the city invested in the Catskills Mountains to ensure that the source of water was even more clean and secure. Today, New York City has the largest unfiltered water system in the country, as the forests and wetlands of the Catskills act as a giant filtration plant.
This investment in forests and wetlands to provide clean water is a “Nature-based Solution” (NbS). An NbS is a solution to a societal challenge, such as maintaining clean water, that nature provides. The NbS that is the Catskills underscores a critical reality: water comes from nature. If we want that water to be clean, then we need to maintain healthy and resilient ecosystems that underpin the water source.
Nature-based solutions for stormwater management have another benefit: they are green spaces in an urban environment. These projects for managing stormwater can take the form of parks, wetlands, “daylighted” creeks, and wildlife habitat, and these investments can be prioritized for communities and neighborhoods that have historically lacked access to nature. The world is rapidly urbanizing, and cities will confront a range of challenges. Well-planned and managed nature-based solutions can contribute to both challenges, providing cost efficiencies to strained city budgets.
Despite growing recognition of the benefits and multiple values that NbS ecosystems provide, investment in these projects, from both the public and private sectors, still lags far behind their potential. There is a need to acknowledge the diverse values from resilient freshwater systems and invest in them. With the Freshwater Challenge, the largest wetland and river restoration project in history, championed by the governments of Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Gabon, Mexico, and Zambia, investment in healthy, resilient ecosystems can provide diverse benefits to people.
Water will always remain an essential resource, but the living systems, the rivers and headwaters that underpin that resource, have always been more than that. They are recognized as a source of food, connection and inspiration across cultures. Water management that focuses on valuing water only as a resource overlooks a far wider range of opportunities and benefits that flow from management that values the resilient systems that produce, and then take back, the water we use. Ultimately, water management should prioritize investments in nature-based solutions that are capable of providing not just clean water, but also numerous other benefits and services.
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