Climate Resilience
Building Community Climate Resilience: Nashua River Watershed-wide Nature-based Solutions Plan
For millions of years, systems in nature have developed and adapted to changing climate conditions allowing communities of plants and animals to survive through droughts, floods, excessive heat, and severe storms. By developing strategies that mimic these naturally evolved systems, known as Nature-based Solutions (NbS), we can make our watershed communities, both human and natural, more climate resilient too.
Nature Based Solutions
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can include rain gardens, pocket forests, porous pavement, bioswales, pollinator hedges, and green rooftops. NbS may focus on absorbing and slowing heavy rainfall to prevent flooding, or reducing heat levels in our cities by removing paving or creating more tree canopy. Some landscape-scale solutions, like protecting or restoring forests and wetlands, can also increase the sequestering and storage of carbon, reducing the carbon in our atmosphere that is causing changes in our climate.
Urban bioswale
Through a MA Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) Action Grant, the NRWA worked with municipal officials and community members to explore climate risks, impacts, and NbS in five watershed communities– Ashburnham, Fitchburg, Groton, Leominster, and Pepperell. These cities and towns are representative of the range of conditions (geographic, demographic, land uses/infrastructure, municipal structure) in the watershed, and they can serve as models for all 32 watershed communities.
“The Nashua River Watershed Association recognizes the adverse impacts of climate change to the natural systems that sustain life on our planet. It is the policy of the NRWA to promote and undertake local and regional actions to address the impacts of climate change on our watershed. These actions include developing strategies to address changes in local hydrology and ecology, assisting communities to become more resilient, and helping people to live more sustainably and safely in the face of climate change.”
NRWA Climate Change Policy
The NRWA focused on climate change impacts to our watershed hydrology, the movement of water across the landscape, and our watershed ecology, the relationship of living organisms with each other and the physical landscape. Based on each community’s priority climate-related issues, NRWA and project partners developed a toolkit of potential NbS that can be used to resolve or lessen negative impacts at specific sites. The lessons learned and materials developed through this MVP grant are the basis for this “Building Community Climate Resilience: Nashua River Watershed-wide Nature-based Solutions Plan”.
Climate Impacts
What specific risks and impacts are our watershed communities facing due to our changing climate?
Nature-based Solutions
What Nature-based Solutions will help our communities address the impacts of climate change? A look at key strategies, co-benefits of NbS, and NbS tools.
Materials from Five Study Communities
In the first year of the MVP project, sites were identified in each of the five project communities, site visits were conducted, and NbS plans and toolkit materials were prepared for each site. View maps, tools, reports, meeting minutes, and more from year one.
Importance of Soils for Nature-based Solutions
The characteristics and health of the soil at any specific location will determine which Nature-based Solution will be most successful for that property, as well as where the NbS should be sited, and how it should be designed and implemented.
This “Building Community Climate Resilience: Nashua River Watershed-wide Nature-based Solutions Plan” is funded by a Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness grant awarded to the City of Fitchburg by the Healey-Driscoll Administration’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) program, which is administered by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA). The NRWA served as the lead coordinator on this project, assisted by consultants BSC Group and Regenerative Design Group, and four additional municipal partners including Ashburnham, Groton, Leominster, and Townsend.
