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The Problem
Towns
around the Charles River watershed and New England are struggling with runaway growth.
This growth threatens the health of our environment and our
communities in a myriad of ways, from water resources to rare natural
communities to recreational open space. Unplanned development also ignores both the capacity of rivers and
streams to assimilate stormwater pollution and natural limits to the amount of
groundwater available to meet demands for drinking water.
Much has been written recently about low impact
development (LID), or the landscaping design for
developments that effectively eliminates stormwater runoff
as a problem mitigating some of the impacts associated with sprawl. LID introduces rain gardens and swales to new developments
or redevelopments, and reduces potable water consumption while enhancing
recharge with technical solutions and technical fixes like CRWA's SmartStorm®
system. In CRWA's work, however, it is clear that there is a significant
step missing if town planners take existing zoning and simply apply
LID techniques expecting to end water problems.
Land and water work together. It is in our interest to
identify how and where land and water interactions
are critical to environmental sustainability,
wildlife habitat, and surface water flow. We ignore these links
at our peril.
Recognizing this, CRWA, over a period of six years, has
developed a land analysis methodology, we call Resource,
Environmental, and Land (REAL) Planning ,
which has been referred to in its first iterations
locally as "environmental zoning." REAL Planning identifies
those land areas where development of any kind should simply be avoided.
The Objective
REAL Planning helps communities undertake an initial analysis of the environmental issues facing their
towns, identifies the “environmental infrastructure” that is vital to
sustaining the community’s natural resources and community character,
and explains how to use this information as the basis for building sustainable
communities. REAL Planning also helps to identify areas where action to protect resources is
needed, to flesh out what additional information needs to be collected,
and to prioritize the more detailed planning and analysis needed to
address these issues.
The Approach
CRWA began the project in Medfield,
Massachusetts where we
analyzed land use in the town to help identify, protect, and acquire open
space in Medfield to retain the town's character and sustain environmental
resources. Projects in Holliston and Littleton followed. In
these towns, we combined open space analysis with water quantity and
quality assessments. Together, these three methodologies make up the
process of REAL Planning. The sidebar on the right highlights
the results of the Littleton case study.
REAL Planning uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
to collect and present data. The
process
is made up of four basic analyses:
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Identify resources to be
protected;
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Map existing town infrastructure;
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Develop a water budget; and
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Assess water quality.
After these four analyses are performed, communities
will have a “first cut” understanding of where the most suitable areas
for development are, and what areas should be protected, in the form of
maps. Click the link below to learn more about REAL Planning and how
to navigate through the REAL web pages.
The Result
Among the many things communities learn about
avoiding the impacts of growth over times, REAL Planning provides them
with a prescriptive map of land critical to long-term sustainability,
habitat protection and wildlife. Using their Priority Lands map to
guide open space acquisitions, zoning decisions, and growth planning,
preserving these priority areas, reducing development in them, and when
developing them, using best environmental practices, will help protect and
sustain critical environmental resources and help curtail sprawl.
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WATERSHED INFO
