Healthy Watersheds Program

A healthy watershed has mostly natural land cover, especially near its waters; good water quality, quantity, and flow; and habitats with diverse aquatic life. Together, these components support long-term, sustainable benefits to people and the environment.

On this page:

• About the Program
• Types of Assistance
• How This Program Helps Build Resilience
• Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

About the Program

The Healthy Watersheds Program (HWP) supports the protection of high-quality waters under the CWA objective “…to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Healthy watersheds provide important services such as clean drinking water, productive fisheries, and outdoor recreational opportunities that support our economies, environment, and overall quality of life. Protecting high-quality waters is critical for addressing future threats such as emerging water quality problems, loss and fragmentation of aquatic habitat, altered water flow and availability, invasive species, and other impacts from long-term climatic changes.

Types of Assistance

HWP offers state, Tribal, local, and other program partners a range of assistance that can help promote healthy watersheds as a way to build climate resilience.

Technical Assistance

To support states and tribes in their efforts to identify, protect, and maintain healthy watersheds across the United States, HWP developed free, publicly available data and tools.

• The Preliminary Healthy Watersheds Assessments (PHWA) is a set of statewide and ecoregion-scale assessments that score watershed health and vulnerability across the conterminous United States.
• The Watershed Index Online (WSIO) data indicator library is a decision-support tool meant to assist resource managers, citizens, and other users with evaluating, comparing, and prioritizing watersheds for a user-defined purpose.
• The Recovery Potential Screening (RPS) Tool provides states and other restoration planners with a systematic, flexible means to compare watershed differences according to WSIO, PHWA, and other user-identified data, which can inform a variety of management decisions around watershed restoration and protection.

Convening Assistance

HWP interacts with states, other federal agencies, and conservation partners to engage them in sharing successful assessment and protection data, strategies, barriers to success, and project approaches.

Financial Assistance

Through the Healthy Watersheds Consortium Grants (2015–2022), EPA, U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the U.S. Endowment for Forestry & Communities (grantee administering the program) invested a total of $11 million to support 56 healthy watersheds projects across 31 states. HWC grants were awarded to a range of partners (e.g., states, Tribes, conservation organizations, and water utilities) to support locally-led protection strategies by providing, for example, staffing support to establish and grow regionally-based conservation partnerships, technical assistance to local governments on developing tax-based conservation funding programs, and water quality monitoring that led to newly designated high-quality waters. Together, these projects contributed to the protection of more than 1 million acres of land and 5,100 stream miles.

Outreach and Education Assistance

• The HWP website and other outreach efforts help to maintain regular communication with state and Tribal water programs, a broad array of agencies and organizations (e.g., DOI’s Landscape Conservation Cooperatives; National Fish Habitat Partnerships) involved in watershed assessment and protection, and the general public.
• Technical and non-technical dialogues span topics such as important types of waters to protect, data and methods sharing, activities of potential partners, and building awareness of watershed protection benefits.

How This Program Helps Build Resilience

HWP has funded several resilience-focused projects, including the two highlighted below.

Healthy Watersheds Consortium Grant in California

From 2016 to 2017, $225,000 was given to the Pacific Forest Trust to develop policies, technical assessments, implementation plans, and financing options needed to restore California’s key watersheds. The project aimed to improve the climate resilience and reliability of the state’s water supply system through landscape-scale restoration and conservation, increasing water security for millions of Californians and protecting critical wildlife habitat. This grant has helped leverage private and public capital to enable the comprehensive protection and stewardship of these forested watersheds, defining these 7 million acres as essential infrastructure for the state’s water system.

Meramec River Watershed Integrated Planning

A $50,000 Healthy Watersheds pilot project was funded in 2018 to integrate healthy watershed protection into hazard mitigation plans (HMPs) across the Meramec River watershed. Hazard mitigation planning is aimed at identifying risks and vulnerabilities associated with natural disasters, and to develop long-term strategies for protecting people and property from future hazard events. A FEMA-approved HMP, which must be updated every five years, is required to receive certain types of non-emergency disaster or mitigation assistance. By integrating nature-based solutions in a FEMA-approved HMP, states and localities may be able to leverage FEMA planning and implementation resources for green stormwater management (both low-impact development [LID] and green infrastructure) and watershed protection activities. These funds have allowed contracting services to explore integrating LID/green infrastructure and watershed planning into relevant FEMA HMPs. Selected study projects must demonstrate that the proposal and project elements have been developed collaboratively with FEMA and a local or state jurisdiction.

Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

The HWP is working to support the protection of high-quality waters by integrating with core CWA program activities, including the CWA Section 303(d) Program for impaired waters listings and restoration plans (total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs) and the CWA Section 319 Program for nonpoint source pollution (NPS) control. These integration efforts provide a programmatic basis for addressing healthy watersheds and offer additional opportunities for states to promote protection approaches through 303(d) program priorities, NPS management plans, and other watershed-based plans.

One goal of HWP is to further promote watershed protection by partnering with other government, non-government, and private entities involved in landscape conservation. HWP can establish collaborative partnerships and engage with other federal, state, and local organizations through the online educational platform referenced above.