Did you Know? Keeping Watersheds Healthy as the Climate Changes

By Dorie Stolley, Watershed Action Alliance Coordinator and Outreach Manager

Raining cats and dogs

Does it seem like rain is falling harder these days compared to year past? It’s not an illusion. Here in New England, it’s raining more and with greater intensity due to climate change. Between 1960 and 2010, the total amount of precipitation we receive in Massachusetts in one year increased by about 10%. In Boston, that has meant a change from 40 to 45 inches, and over time more of that precipitation is coming in heavy downpours.  

This presents a challenge to maintaining healthy watersheds. Big, heavy raindrops slamming down forcefully on bare dirt wash a lot of soil into the waterways. Also, when a lot of rain falls in a short time, the ground is unable to absorb it all. The water runs off the surface, washing through lawns, yards and streets and down hills, picking up pollutants, sediment and trash as it heads toward our streams and rivers. And, if an area is mostly covered with asphalt and pavement, so-called impervious surfaces, runoff rates are even higher.  

There are important things to do in your backyard, in your town and in new developments to lessen the impacts of greater and heavier precipitation on water quality.

One of the most important strategies in your yard or in your town is to plant and maintain riparian buffers, dense planted areas next to streams and ponds. The vegetation breaks the force of the water as it falls preventing it from eroding as much soil. Buffers also slow the water’s rush downhill and filter out pollutants.

Rain garden next to Great Herring Pond in Plymouth, MA

Individual homeowners and municipalities can also maintain grassy swales, or vegetated ditches that run along contours, where water can collect during a storm, travel more slowly to waterways and percolate into the soil.  Another common tool is the rain garden, a depression in the soil planted with a variety of native plants to filter and uptake greater quantities of water while also beautifying an area and providing food for pollinating insects.

Wherever your town is considering allowing new developments, it is very important to keep climate change in mind to keep water quality high. Reducing the amount of allowable impervious surface promotes a healthy watershed. This can be done by clustering houses together and leaving natural areas free from development, which can then double as recreation amenities, such as hiking trails.

Want to find out more about your watershed? Visit: www.watershedaction.org