Kent County Green Infrastructure Assessment

Partners turn to The Conservation Fund to effectively utilize the green infrastructure approach to strategic conservation to advance their conservation objectives. The Fund convenes leadership forums to obtain stakeholder input, designs green infrastructure networks, and assembles an implementation quilt to effectively and efficiently achieve on-the-ground results.

Summary

The Fund completed the Kent County, Delaware Rapid Assessment of Green Infrastructure in 2006. The rapid assessment delineates the County’s ecological network of forests, wetlands, and aquatic systems; evaluates existing working landscape protection programs, and identifies development management and land conservation tools that can be used to achieve local and state conservation objectives.

Challenge

The State’s Livable Delaware initiative is a strategy to combat land consumptive sprawl by well-designed growth to areas where new development is planned. Key goals of the initiative include protection of cropland, commercially viable forestland, and natural resource and recreation priorities. Building on our partnership with the State that published Better Models for Development in Delaware, the Fund expanded on its philosophy that the most important model for development is first assessing where development should not take place.

Solution

Using the green infrastructure approach to strategic conservation, the Fund delineated the Delaware Ecological Network, prepared protected lands and working landscape inventories, and performed an historical evaluation of the State’s purchase of development rights program for agricultural lands. We also convened a Leadership Forum of over 20 public and private conservation partners to provide input on green infrastructure suitability analysis and land parcel scoring systems for ecological systems and working landscapes. Based on the results from the Leadership Forum and Network Design, the Fund developed an Implementation Quilt with recommendations on where State funding and policy can be directed to achieve the most beneficial and cost effective strategies for ecological and working landscape protection.

Results

The rapid assessment identified 48,400 acres of unprotected land inside Kent County’s green infrastructure network, encompassing approximately 130,000 acres (or 34%) of the County’s land area. The assessment also identified 60,000 acres as an appropriate target to achieve the Livable Delaware goal for productive farmland in Kent County and recommended $8 million in annual funding to achieve this target by 2024. A transfer of development rights program also was recommended to complement existing State and Federal acquisition efforts.

Rapid Assessment of Green Infrastructure, Kent County, DE (Download PDF)
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