15th Annual Chesapeake Watershed Forum

A watershed-wide event reaching over 400 restoration and protection practitioners to inspire and empower local action towards clean water. We share successful tools and techniques, offer lessons and learnings from on-the-ground work, build capacities of local organizations, foster partnerships, educate on new initiatives and emerging practices, network among each other, and celebrate our successes.

Through our theme, “Climate Resiliency in a Changing Chesapeake Watershed,” we share our responses to the changing climatic and sea level conditions that alter the natural and human systems of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We seek to highlight restoration and conservation approaches and policies that enhance the resiliency of our lands, aquatic systems, and communities to withstand adverse impacts of climate change, such as more intense and frequent storms, extreme coastal and inland flooding, sea level rise, altered weather patterns, and seasonable variability. We hope to expand our understanding of the human effects of climate change, including its ties to public health, human migration, and social justice. We will look to address climate change as an inherent issue of environmental justice, and its disproportionate impact upon communities of color and low-income communities. Finally, we seek models of resilient partnerships capable of withstanding the stressors and adversity posed by climate change