| Scope Environmental issues do not respect regional, county or other geographic boundaries. Still, the authors sought the best regional information available on three key areas: air, water and land. Under the topic of Air, the focus is on air quality. Water looks at both water quality and water-supply quantities, focusing on water quality of the region’s surface waters, which include streams, rivers and lakes, and on public water system consumption. Land spotlights the disposal of municipal solid waste and construction/demolition debris, as well as how much acreage per person is developed in the region. In the future, the authors would like to address the topic of energy and related indicators, as well as include additional indicators pertinent to air, water and land. For more on possible future topics, see the Missing and Future Indicators section in this report.
Regional Context
The region has seen unprecedented growth and development over the last two decades. The 30-year period from 1970 to 2000 saw population grow by 68 percent, and the region is projected to grow by as much or more in the 30-year period from 2000 to 2030. As a result, challenges to air and water quality have arisen, along with a re-examination of predominant land-use patterns and energy usage. A large portion of the region was declared in Non-Attainment of the Clean Air Act by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2005. The region has suffered major droughts in recent years, raising consciousness about water supply and consumption.
The region and its local governments have responded to these challenges in a variety of ways. The 1998 Regional Environmental Summit brought together over 500 people representing businesses, local governments and the public to develop a regional environmental vision. Volunteer Action Teams then spent a year developing action plans for each of these environmental categories: air quality and transportation, water quality, resource recovery/recycling, land use and open space. The regional nonprofit, Voices & Choices of the Carolinas, published a regional State of the Environment Report in 2004. Mecklenburg County has published a county-level bi-annual State of the Environment report since 1988. Local land trusts emerged around the region beginning in the 1980s. As of 2007, five local land trusts collectively are providing stewardship of over 21,000 acres of undeveloped land, permanently protected through conservation easements or land purchases. Most local jurisdictions that did not have any land-use regulations in place two decades ago now have adopted land-use plans and zoning ordinances. Several jurisdictions in the region are regarded as national models for New Urbanist land-use planning concepts which encourage compact development that is walkable and bikeable, incorporate a mix of land uses, require public open space and implement low-impact design stormwater-management practices. The region’s transportation planning organizations have taken first steps in addressing the region’s air quality Non-Attainment status by developing the multi-jurisdictional Long-Range Transportation Plan. The plan is based on sophisticated modeling of future transportation demand from a growing population. The regional Sustainable Environment for Quality of Life (SEQL) initiative sponsored by Centralina Council of Government and Catawba Regional Council of Governments involves elected officials, local government staffs, business and industry groups, economic development groups and environmental stakeholders working together toward viable solutions to regional growth. Over 80 jurisdictions have implemented a cumulative total of over 800 action items. This initiative has been followed by Carolinas-Charlotte-CONNECT, also sponsored by the two COGs. It is articulating a regional set of core values about land development and growth management drawn from locally adopted land-use plans and public policy documents. By spring 2008, CONNECT expects to formulate a regional vision for sustainable growth based on the core values.
Summary of Indicator Results
With air quality, the trend shows the Metropolitan Statistical Area’s (MSA) percentage of unhealthy Air Quality Index days has declined over the past decade. However, a large portion of the region was declared in Non-Attainment of the Clean Air Act by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2005 for ground-level ozone. A contributor to the MSA being in non-attainment despite a decline in unhealthy air days is that the EPA raised the standard for ozone attainment to better protect public health.
As the region’s population continues to grow, controlling contributions to ground-level ozone formation from sources such as on-road vehicular, nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions will be increasingly critical to public health and thus to workplace productivity and the region’s attractiveness as a place to live and work. Failing to control growth in per capita nitrogen-oxides emissions will increase the difficulty of controlling ground-level ozone formation, which in turn will increase the difficulty and cost of returning the region to compliance with the Clean Air Act. With water consumption, the more urban counties tend to show lower per person consumption figures than their more rural counterparts, likely reflecting the impact of spreading industrial uses of public water over larger, more concentrated populations. Since the more urban counties also tend to cluster along region’s river systems, the lower per capita figure also may reflect more industrial water users in those counties relying on their own water-intake permits rather than public water systems. Seven of the region’s North Carolina counties reported reduced average daily water consumption per person between 1992 and 2002: Catawba, Cleveland, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln, Rowan, and Union. Among South Carolina counties, Chester and York showed a reduction in per person daily consumption over the three-year period, 2001-2003. The most immediate connections for water consumption are health-related and economic. Both intermittent drought years and continued population growth with its commensurate demands for industrial and power generation as well as residential and commercial uses of water have the potential to strain the region’s water resources. That places a premium on good water resources management, including water conservation, appropriate uses of potable and reclaimed water and careful allocation of water supplies among industry, power generators and domestic consumers. Related to water quality, impaired streams occur in both urban and rural parts of the region, but are more prevalent downstream of urban areas. The quality of water in streams reflects land use. It is also affected by permitted and regulated discharges from public and industrial wastewater treatment systems as well as by accidental spills and stormwater runoff. Stormwater runoff can carry pollutants from roads, parking lots, lawns, constructions sites and agricultural areas. Such pollutants include sediment, bacteria, petroleum products from vehicles, and nitrogen and other commercial fertilizer residue. With land indicators, disposal of municipal solid waste and construction/demolition debris is a significant measure. The 3-county South Carolina average per capita disposal rate for such waste and debris increased by 3 percent from 2004 to 2006. Meanwhile, North Carolina’s 11-county average increased by nearly 12 percent between 2005 and 2006 after almost no change from 2004 to 2005. A significant portion of the North Carolina increase is attributable to demolition of the former Pillowtex plant in Kannapolis, which pushed Cabarrus County’s disposal rate up 45 percent between fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 Even in this rapidly growing region, municipal solid waste is typically a much larger component of the total waste stream than construction and demolition debris. Efforts to meet disposal reduction goals have thus tended to focus on household and commercial/industrial waste disposal. In the future, however, efforts to reduce construction/demolition waste disposal may have a greater impact on overall waste-disposal reduction. Solid waste disposal represents environmental, economic and even social costs. Transporting waste to landfills adds to mobile emissions of air pollutants, and protecting groundwater from landfill leakage requires costly engineering and decades of site monitoring. Social-justice questions may arise when landfills are located in economically depressed areas or low-income neighborhoods, while the exporting of waste across state lines may raise concerns as well. Viewed as a measure of a community’s efficiency in using and managing resources, reductions in landfill waste represent an opportunity for economic efficiency and productivity gains. With land development, the UNC Charlotte Center for Applied Geographic Information Systems is currently compiling data as part of a study. The data now available are only for three counties in the region (Cabarrus, Mecklenburg and Union), and only for 1996 and 2006. Mecklenburg County’s acreage and population both of which are the largest among the three counties examined at this time drive the three-county regional average for developed acreage per person. It is premature to draw conclusions about trends in the region, or even for a county, without data from the rest of the counties and from prior decades. Once the additional data are available, this method of estimating the region’s average acres developed per day may provide more accurate estimates than those established in a previous study. A 1998 UNC Charlotte Urban Institute study estimated 41 acres per day (averaged from 1980 through 2020 based on projected land uses) using a different methodology. In a rapidly urbanizing area such as the Charlotte region, development and its patterns influence many facets of quality of life. More compact development tends to yield more cost-effective delivery of public services because public infrastructure is not as spread out. It also tends to reduce water runoff associated with roads and parking lots. Agricultural land uses and rural ways of life are more readily maintained when competition for urban and suburban uses does not push up land prices. On the other hand, without careful design, denser development may not reduce vehicle trips, improve air quality or traffic congestion, nor necessarily produce vibrant and aesthetically pleasing places to live and work.
Missing and Future Indicators
In the future, the authors plan to study energy, targeting consumption. Other potential energy topics are conservation, renewable sources and alternative fuels.
Currently, North and South Carolina do not collect energy consumption data in a form that permits reporting below statewide levels; thus, energy data are not included in this year’s report. Possible energy measures to examine are: average BTUs (millions) consumed per person annually, average kilowatt hours consumed per person, green buildings certified by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and average fuel efficiency of registered vehicles (or percentages of alternative fuel-capable and low-emission vehicles) and green-power options (percentages of providers and customers enrolled). In current categories, the air quality assessment would benefit from studying stationary emissions sources (such as power generation plants), specific measures of pollutants (carbon monoxide; particulate matter, PM 2.5 and PM10; nitrogen oxides; sulphur dioxide and ozone) and the respiratory codes from emergency room admissions. Data on stream-buffer regulations, coliform bacteria and sediment-pollutant measures, floodplain development, water-use efficiency (lost through infrastructure, gained through reclaimed water usage) and water-quality violations would enhance indicator monitoring of sustainable water management. With land, another measure for future consideration includes protected open space (either as a per capita figure or percentage of total land area) and comparing publicly protected land to privately protected land. Other helpful measures of land could include tree canopy and the percentage of brownfield sites that have been reclaimed. Looking at how recent local jurisdictions’ adopted land-use plans are, as well as the percentage of developments that are using low-impact designs for stormwater management, would also provide more information.
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