Report Shows Progress—But Much More Needs To Be Done
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s (CBF) 2012 State of the Bay Report shows the health of the Bay improved one point over the last report in 2010, and is up four points since 2008, a 10 percent improvement in less than five years. Of the 13 indicators that make up the report, five improved, seven stayed the same, and only one declined.
“Continued progress shows what can be done when governments, businesses, and individuals work together to save local rivers, streams, and the Chesapeake Bay,” CBF President William C. Baker said. “While the Bay is still dangerously out of balance, I am cautiously optimistic for the future. The federal/state Clean Water Blueprint for the Chesapeake Bay is in place and beginning to work.”
The State of the Bay Report is a comprehensive measure of the Bay’s health, evaluating the following indicators: oysters, shad, crabs, striped bass (rockfish), underwater grasses, wetlands, forested buffers, resource lands, toxics, water clarity, dissolved oxygen, and phosphorus and nitrogen pollution. CBF scientists compile and examine the best available historical and up-to-date information for each indicator and assign it an index score, between 1-100, and a letter grade. Taken together, these indicators offer an assessment of Bay health.
In 2012, levels of phosphorus pollution improved, as did levels of dissolved oxygen, resource lands, oysters, and crabs. Underwater grasses were the only indicator that declined, a result of higher water temperatures that caused eel grass die offs in the lower Bay and heavy rains that washed sediment and pollution into local waterways.
This year’s score of 32 is still far short of goal of 70, which would represent a saved Bay. The unspoiled Bay ecosystem described by Captain John Smith in the 1600s, with its extensive forests and wetlands, clear water, abundant fish and oysters, and lush growths of submerged vegetation serves as the benchmark, and would rate a 100 on CBF’s scale.
“We have made progress, but much of the Bay and many local waterways don’t provide healthy habitat for fish, oysters, and other aquatic life,” Baker said. “Pollution has cost thousands of jobs and continues to put human health at risk.”
The Clean Water Blueprint requires all of us, in all the Bay states, to ratchet down pollution to local creeks, rivers, and the Bay. State and local governments will be held responsible for those reductions or potentially lose federal funding and be denied federal permits.
“We have never before had this level of accountability and transparency in Bay restoratio
