Thirty million acres of unprotected wetlands across the Upper Midwest, including 1 million acres in Illinois, are at risk of being destroyed largely by industrial agriculture — wetlands that provide nearly $23 billion in annual flood mitigation benefits, according to new research. In the long term, these wetlands could prevent hundreds of billions of dollars of flood damage in the region.
“Wetlands can help mitigate flooding and save our homes. They can help clean our water. They can capture and store carbon. They support hunting and recreation, and they support the commercial fishing industry by providing habitats for the majority of commercially harvested fish and shellfish,” said study author Stacy Woods, research director for the Food and Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nationwide nonprofit science advocacy organization.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court stripped protections from freshwater and inland wetlands in its Sackett v. EPA ruling, allowing private property development in wetland areas that don’t have a “continuous surface connection” to permanent bodies of water.
But environmentalists say wetlands are rarely truly “isolated” from a watershed, no matter how inland they may be. Some experts worry that after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, he might roll back President Joe Biden’s effort to counter the Supreme Court ruling by expanding federal regulations of small bodies of water and wetlands under the Clean Water Act. Undoing those protections would leave control of wetlands up to the states, some of which — like Illinois — have no strong safeguards in place.
Half of the nation’s wetlands have disappeared since the 1780s, and urban development and agriculture in Illinois have destroyed as much as 90% of its original marshy, swampy land. Nowadays, its wetlands are vastly outnumbered by the 26.3 million acres of farmland that cover almost three-fourths of the state.
While urban and rural development and climate change disturbances contribute to the problem, the expansion of large-scale agriculture poses the biggest threat to wetlands, according to the study. Advocates see an opportunity in the next farm bill in Congress to support and encourage farmers to protect wetlands on their property.
A wetland is a natural sponge, said Paul Botts, president and executive director of The Wetlands Initiative, a Chicago-based nonprofit that designs, restores and creates wetlands.
By absorbing water from storms and flooding, wetlands can effectively reduce the risks and destructive effects of these disasters, which are intensifying and becoming more frequent because of a changing climate. Previous research estimated that 1 acre of lost wetland can cost $745 in annual flood damage to residential properties, an amount that taxpayers fund through local, state or federal assistance programs.
“The trees and plants in wetlands trap and slow rushing waters, while wetland soil can soak up vast amounts of water,” Woods said. “So communities really benefit greatly from wetlands as natural flood barriers.”
Since 1980, Illinoisans have endured seven flooding events that each caused losses costing more than $1 billion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Six of these happened in the past 16 years.
“That is a staggering cost,” Woods said. “But it’s important to remember that it could have been worse because the existing wetlands in Illinois helped to reduce the impact of those terrible floods.”
A study found that in spring 2019, one of the most recent billion-dollar flooding disasters that hit Illinois and other states prompted 2,204 claims for federal assistance through the National Flood Insurance Program, with claims averaging $14,342. In the aftermath of heavy rains that rolled through Chicago and its suburbs in mid-September last year, the federal government provided over $23 million in relief to Illinois residents.
In the long term, Woods calculated, wetlands could provide flood mitigation benefits of $10.8 billion to $25.2 billion in Illinois and $323 billion to $754 billion across the Upper Midwest, which includes Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
“Nature bequeathed to the flat Midwest a vast number of these sponges scattered all over the place. We spent a couple of hundred years busily filling them in, draining them, etc.,” Botts said. “And if we had more of those original small, scattered sponges across our great Midwest, our suburban areas, our exurban areas and our farming areas would have less local flooding.”
He pointed out that wetlands can be beneficial in controlling smaller floods that don’t qualify homeowners and renters for relief funds — but that can compound and become a nuisance. These are particularly common in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood and suburban Cicero.
“The more routine flooding — it really drives people crazy,” Botts said. “Why the hell is all this water ending up in my basement all the time? Even if it’s just one or two days, it’s also really unpleasant to clean up and it does damage.”
Additional costs are associated with those regular floods, from preventive measures like lining basements, paying higher insurance premiums, and running sump pumps nonstop, all of which are harder to quantify and analyze at a bigger scale.
Dolores Sanchez, a Berwyn resident who lived between Cicero and Chicago during her college career, vividly remembers the first major flood she experienced in the suburban town in 2010. Water levels reached her thighs in the basement where she used to sleep. Her family bought a sump pump that helped except during more intense storms when the electricity went out.
“People have been advocating throughout the years to get more green spaces,” she said. “There are a ton of empty lots that are not being put to use. … Because flooding is going to continue to happen in Cicero, and it’s horrible.”
Her family stopped using the basement, dreading the next rainfall. She said her former neighbors and her relatives who still live in the suburb have their basements flooded almost every time it storms.
“The local adds up to the occasional giant flood that makes all the headlines, but it’s the regular, local every-other-year kind of flooding — that’s really the point of the spear, where these small, scattered wetlands can really help,” Botts said. “It isn’t just about the big, giant floods.”
Rippling benefits
Even these considerable costs don’t capture the myriad benefits that healthy wetlands offer.
For instance, they help mitigate climate change in other ways. Besides reducing flooding, wetlands trap and store carbon, preventing the gas from heating the atmosphere.
According to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the wetlands it manages can store up to 6,000 tons of this heat-trapping greenhouse gas each year, the equivalent of what coal-fired power plants would release to provide electricity to 1,059 homes annually.
“Wetlands trap and store over 30% of soil-stored carbon on Earth, which is especially impressive when you consider that wetlands only cover about 6% of the Earth’s surface,” Woods said. “So that’s incredible.”
Yet this can be a double-edged sword, she said.
When wetlands are damaged or destroyed, they release that stored carbon as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, which accelerate climate change. Even rising temperatures can have this effect on intact habitats by increasing the activity of microbes and speeding the breakdown of organic matter in waterlogged soil, which emits methane.
Wetlands also support wildlife such as aquatic animals, amphibians, reptiles and insects; a decline in biodiversity can cause large losses for the region’s thriving outdoor recreation, tourism, hunting and fishing industries. Wetland vegetation can absorb contaminants in the water, keeping them from moving downstream.
In Illinois, these pollutants include nitrogen and phosphorous from wastewater treatment plants, urban stormwater drainage and agricultural runoff, which flow into the Mississippi River Basin. Making their way into the Gulf of Mexico, these contaminants create an oxygen-void area, or “dead zone,” that pushes fish and shrimp away or kills them, causing billions of dollars in damage to local fisheries and marine habitats.
The future of wetlands protection
Some Midwestern states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, offer comprehensive protections for water bodies. Seven states across the country, including Illinois, don’t have laws as robust but do provide some regulatory protections for nonfederal waters, according to the Environmental Law Institute.
Illinois protects its wetlands only from state-funded activities. But some local governments go further: A DuPage County ordinance requires a stormwater permit for developments near wetlands, and a Lake County ordinance protects all bodies of water outside of federal jurisdiction.
A coalition of environmentalists and state lawmakers are pushing for stronger legislation.
Earlier this year, Sen. Laura Ellman, a Naperville Democrat, and Rep. Anna Moeller, an Elgin Democrat, introduced companion bills in the Illinois General Assembly that would establish a permitting program to protect wetlands from pollution and draining.
If passed, the Wetlands and Small Streams Protection Act would empower the state’s Department of Natural Resources to regulate private land use around the state’s remaining wetlands.
“The law … would, for the great majority of existing wetlands in Illinois, simply establish a permit process,” Botts said.
At the federal level, a new farm bill being drafted in Congress — an extensive piece of legislation that sets agricultural and conservation policy nationwide — could address regulatory rollbacks from the executive and judicial branches. After a largely bipartisan history, the new bill has been delayed for more than a year by policy disagreement between Republicans and Democrats.
Woods hopes legislators can come together to significantly raise the cap on acreage that can be enrolled in the decades-old Conservation Reserve Program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
She recommended increasing support for that and similar USDA-administered programs that fund and assist farmers in restoring damaged wetlands on their properties and converting cropland back into wetlands. These programs also encourage adopting agricultural conservation practices like planting cover crops, eliminating harmful tilling and reducing fertilizer and pesticide use.
Expanding equity initiatives also would provide all farmers — especially those who are new or have been historically underserved — access to federal conservation programs to preserve and restore wetlands.
“The recommendations we make demand only a fraction of the annual value that wetlands deliver,” Woods said. “I think as research continues coming out, it shows how incredibly valuable wetlands are to everyone in the United States.”
That’s because even people who don’t live near drained wetlands pay taxes to help others recover from residential flooding, she said. And it’s not hard to empathize with those suffering such a devastating loss.
“One thing I know is that, no matter how you voted in the recent election, you don’t want to lose your home to flooding,” Woods said. “And that’s why no matter how we vote, no matter what party we align with, we should be invested in protecting wetlands.”
Chicago Tribune’s Karina Atkins contributed.
