H.R. 4715: The Clean Estuaries Act of 2010

The Clean Estuaries Act of 2010 is an amendment to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly known as the Clean Water Act), whose purpose is to reauthorize the National Estuary Program. Its key goals include expanding the requirements governing conservation and management plans and using collaborative processes to develop a new plan or update existing plans through a management conference. The Clean Estuaries Act also requires the EPA to evaluate conservation and management plan implementation every four years to determine the degree to which the goals of the plan have been met. The results of these evaluations would be submitted to the appropriate management conference for review and comment and the report would be made available to the public. Among other revisions of management, the Clean Estuaries Act also aims to redefine the terms for estuaries and estuarine zones and reporting on the effectiveness of programs and practices for improving water quality, natural resources and sustainable uses of estuaries covered by the conference.

In their presentation, the team explained to their fellow students and faculty how the legislation addresses climate change and how it increases accountability for evaluation, response and approval. They addressed the ways the Clean Estuaries Act supports sustainable management of estuaries and evaluated the challenges to implementation. In particular, they outlined ecological functions and services, water quality degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change impacts. One of the outcomes of the amendment to the Clean Water Act would be to include the Great Lakes in the category of estuarine zones, potentially impacting conservation strategies to deal with environmental degradation in that area.

Final report