Valley Land Conservation and Chesapeake Bay Restoration: Time to Set New Targets

It’s Chesapeake Bay Awareness Week. A week set aside to celebrate the culture, history and natural beauty of the nation’s largest estuary.

And as we near the 2025 deadline to reach the targets set by the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement, the Chesapeake Bay Program Partnership, made up of state legislators, federal agencies, universities, and nonprofit organizations, is re-evaluating the decades-long effort to clean up and revive the Chesapeake Bay and the streams and rivers that fill it.

As with any ambitious program, progress has been varied. In some sectors, we’ve fallen short of the targets set for 2025, and going forward we’ll need more innovation and investment. And in other sectors, we’ve met or exceeded targets–but our work is far from finished.

Now is the time for Virginia decision makers to commit to new targets that reflect today’s opportunities and challenges, including a continued commitment to land conservation.

Although we are miles from the Bay itself, Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley’s efforts working with local partners to preserve and enhance the Valley’s lands, waters, farms, forests, and vibrant communities are inseparable from the Bay’s restoration progress.

And the benefit is mutual. The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, and the state, federal and private investment that come with it, brings local public benefit here in the Valley – clean drinking water, healthy rivers, agricultural vitality, wildlife habitat, local jobs, and opportunities for landowners to protect working farm and forest land with conservation easements. Just as our Valley and the Bay are directly connected, land and water conservation are inseparable. Conserving our open space, and protecting it from development, remain critical to an agricultural future for our region and to Bay restoration.

In fact, it has never been more critical. There are new and imposing threats to the future of open space in the Valley and throughout the Bay region that did not exist when the goals were set in 2014. The projected proliferation of data centers, poorly sited development, and urban sprawl are present and future threats to large, open landscapes, the products they produce and public benefits they provide.

The framework of the Bay Program creates technical and financial support for landowners to take voluntary conservation actions on their land, such as adopting best management practices for water quality and permanently protecting farms and forests with conservation easements.

Many farmers and landowners in our region are proactively employing farming and land management practices that protect and improve water quality. Landowners use conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements between a landowner and the easement holder tailored to meet the landowner’s unique goals for their property, to permanently and proactively protect their property from development. Conservation easements allow future generations to enjoy open spaces and a rural way of life and have access to high quality farmland to produce their food, fiber, and clean water.

The organizations, landowners, and communities that work together to protect land and legacy depend on financial and programmatic support from commitments made in the Bay Program.

We applaud all the landowners and organizations who have supported land conservation in the Valley, Virginia and beyond. Their sustained efforts will have positive ripple effects for decades to come.

But our work is not finished–now is the time to re-evaluate, learn, regroup, and focus on the outcomes that matter most for conserved lands and clean water in our own communities here in the Valley and throughout the Chesapeake Bay region.

Kevin Tate is Director of Conservation at nonprofit Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley.