The massive, decades-long effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay is at an inflection point.
Significant progress has been made, including restoring oyster habitat across the region. Other goals have proven more difficult to achieve, such as cutting pollution.
Growing challenges from climate change now threaten to stall or reverse progress — and local environmental groups worry that proposed changes to the document guiding the bay restoration do not address those threats.
“We are glossing over this giant problem that's going to make the bay agreements today and of the future really, really difficult,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of the Norfolk nonprofit Wetlands Watch.
The concerns stem from the recent release of a draft new iteration of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement.
Virginia and other states around the region signed onto the most recent agreement in 2014. It set 31 benchmarks for participants to voluntarily achieve by 2025, such as boosting seagrass and crab populations. Officials failed to meet about a third of the targets by this year’s deadline.
Late last year, the Chesapeake Executive Council, which includes Gov. Glenn Youngkin and sets the strategic vision for the restoration, launched an effort to formally revise the document by the end of 2025.
The resulting draft was developed by a Chesapeake Bay Program committee made up of nearly three dozen members from various state and federal agencies.
The draft document simplifies goals, consolidating the previous 10 goals and 31 specific outcomes into four broader goals and 21 outcomes.
The agreement “acknowledges that the partnership cannot address every issue at once and that progress must be made in a strategic manner, focusing on efforts that will achieve the most meaningful and cost-effective results,” officials wrote in the draft.
The 2014 agreement included climate resiliency as a goal and set objectives, including monitoring shifting sea level conditions in the bay ecosystem.
The new draft does not mention climate change or sea level rise by name, Stiff said.
“All of a sudden, they change tune and use politically palatable language like ‘changing conditions,’” she said. “To not really speak truthfully about what the challenges are, it does a disservice to everyone who's a part of the hard work to actually implement the goals. The time is now to be radical.”
She said the change is especially stark because of the Bay Program’s historic acknowledgement of local climate impacts, such as warming waters, which can harm marine life and spur the growth of harmful algae.
A landmark report by the program in 2023 noted that restoration efforts needed to significantly change course to meet its goals, including placing more emphasis on factors such as climate change and population growth.
Stiff said Wetlands Watch is also deeply concerned about the revised targets for preserving and rebuilding wetlands.
Leaders have only met about 5% of lofty wetlands goals set a decade ago. “I think everybody can agree they were unattainable,” Stiff said.
But the new draft goes too far in the opposite direction, she said, aiming to protect fewer additional wetlands than the 5% already achieved.
Analyses by state officials, Wetlands Watch and NASA have each concluded that coastal Virginia will likely lose more than 80% of its tidal wetlands by the end of the century, largely due to rising sea levels. Much of that decline is expected to be frontloaded within the next few decades.
“By the time you get to 2030, 2040, when the agreement is set to conclude, we've already lost a lot of our tidal wetlands,” Stiff said. “So it confuses us as to why there's no attention to this detail in the agreement, and that the goals are so weak.”
The nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation voiced its concerns about the agreement in a statement last month.
Senior policy director Keisha Sedlacek said the draft includes key goals, but “lacks accountability and important details.”
“The current draft of the Bay Agreement is incomplete — and the holes matter,” Sedlacek said. “This is a defining moment for the Chesapeake Bay. We have made tremendous progress, but the system remains out of balance. Growing threats from climate change add to the challenge.”
The Bay Foundation advocates a uniform deadline of 2035 for all goals, defining targets more clearly and addressing challenges from climate change within each goal.
Sedlacek said the agreement should also reaffirm commitments to cutting pollution that are legally required under the Clean Water Act.
“If those pollution reduction commitments are abandoned, we will explore all options—including litigation,” she wrote.
The Bay Program will present a revised draft next month to its management board. The Executive Council will vote on a final version in December.
