Watershed Restoration

Your community's sustainable revitalization program should eventually encompass your entire region for maximum effectiveness. 

But, it can start with a primary focus on any of the 12 sectors of restorable assets, at any scale.  One of the best restorable assets on which to base regionalization efforts is your watershed. 

If you've already got a strong watershed restoration program, it could be an ideal sponsor for your community's Real Revitalization  Program.  Is this organization trusted and effective?  Does it wish to take a larger role in the community's future? If so, sponsoring the Real Revitalization Program is also the best way to help it create (or become) a revitalization forum. 

A revitalization forum is a permanent public-private organization that supports an ongoing revitalization program.  [Note: Readers of reWealth (McGraw-Hill, 2008) will recognize this type of organization as what that book technically referred to as a "renewal engine". It was revealed as the key factor behind the most dramatic urban regeneration success stories documented in reWealth.]

Definition & overview: There are a number of definitions of "watershed".  Here is one from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary: "The whole region or area contributing to the supply of a river or lake; drainage area."  The Federal Hydrologic Unit Code used in the U.S. (especially in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), divides water resource areas into the following taxonomy, starting with the largest and descending: region, sub-region, basin (as in river basin), sub-basin, watershed, and sub-watershed.

Integrated water resources planning is the most powerful trend in water industries today.  Given the distressed, overtaxed condition of most watersheds around the world, and the decrepit, obsolete, and overtaxed condition of most sewage and drinking water infrastructure in communities around the world, it's no surprise that the largest component of most integrated water resources plans is restorative, as in redesigning/replacing/renovating existing water infrastructure, restoring watersheds, etc. 

To illustrate this integration trend, here's a quote from "River Basins and Coastal Systems Planning within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers" (National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, 2004): "An ideal environment for fully integrated water project planning that addresses social, economic, and environmental objectives at all relevant spatial and temporal scales would require a substantial amount of advance investigation and planning at the scale of river basins and coastal systems.... The Corps and other federal agencies have been charged with fostering an 'ecosystem approach' that seeks to integrate social and economic goals with the restoration and preservation of natural ecosystems. Simply minimizing harm to the environment is, therefore, no longer sufficient. The Corps should endeavor to improve environmental quality in all of its projects (not just its restoration projects)."