Wetlands Watch: Resilience Approaches of a Virginia Coalition Member

Pat Calvert interviewed Skip Stiles, Executive Director at Wetlands Watch, a statewide Coalition organization based in Norfolk, Virginia. Wetlands Watch’s new mission statement says, “We work where land, communities, and water meet to protect nature in a changing climate.” 

Starting out in 1999 as a volunteer group, they met around a kitchen table to fight a wetlands permit. “We stuck around and expanded to advocate for better protection of wetlands statewide. In 2007, after meeting with scientists about the impacts of sea level rise, we began to concentrate on protecting wetlands from climate change impacts. One of the first groups in the country to work on that, our goal is to protect Virginia’s wetlands today, tomorrow, and forever.”

Current Work 

When asked what one of his current projects that he is the most excited about, Skip articulated that “we bring university students with a senior capstone requirement into low-moderate income communities to do resilience planning work. We’ve mostly involved engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture students to date, working in partnership with the neighborhood members and the local government.”

University Students being awarded for their resilience designs 

At the end of the process, the community has conceptual resilience designs and plans produced by the residents that can be used for grant proposals. This also provides the students with real-world, resilience experience that they can use throughout their career. Skip emphasized that “our most successful project to date was the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia, which used the student plans as the start for a $125 million federal resilience grant!”

Future Plans

When asking about focus issues for clean water restoration, Skip commented that “we’re going to stay focused on developing ways to ensure wetlands survive climate change. Nontidal wetlands are threatened by changes in flood/drought cycles, tidal wetlands are threatened by sea level rise.” 

By developing a broad set of approaches using government policy, contractor training, public outreach, stakeholder education, resilience design, and a host of other strategies, restoration is enacted. Without these actions, wetlands losses on the order that are being projected will result in a major reversal of clean water gains made to date.

Coalition Cooperation

Being a member of the Coalition has also provided benefits. “The Choose Clean Water Coalition is a force extender for us. We’re too small to have a lot of statewide reach or political clout but working within the Coalition we can take our work to the next level. We also benefit from having other organizations we can turn to on policy issues as well as organizational issues to benefit from others’ experience: we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Skip concluded with an approach that encompasses the work of everyone involved. “On those days when things seem overwhelming, it is so great to see Wetlands Watch as part of a larger community, all working together. It gives us energy to push ahead.”

This interview was edited for clarity by Rosey Pasco, Choose Clean Water Coalition’s Communications Intern