Watershed Wealth was designed to benefit as many user groups as possible, including:

Natural resource managers

Natural resource agencies are realizing they need new ways to meet their regulatory requirements for habitat restoration and species protection because they do not have adequate enforcement capacity to deal with the scale of impact from human activity, and because heavy handed approaches have produced negative legal and public perception results. The first target habitat for this program is heavily altered or denuded habitat anywhere in a watershed. When involving riparian zones (on either lentic or lotic systems), sites with low or no biodiversity or function are the priority. WWC helps natural resource managers meet their mandated agendas while decreasing (and hopefully reversing) the rate of habitat destruction and resulting violations they have to deal with.
Creating incentive-based economic activities in riparian areas will create the missing “on-ground” focal point around which the accomplishment of regulatory habitat goals can be achieved with an eager, rather than recalcitrant, response by landowners. Non-extractive yet productive use of sensitive areas will appeal more to landowners and the public than restrictive set-asides and buffers.

Landowners

Well conceived and executed environmental projects almost always result in increased property values. Large and small scale farmers, urban dwellers and developers are interested in preserving their way of life and developing new ways to generate income. There are many plants, fungi and other organisms which have a value as ornamental, edible or medicinal products. The carefully designed and monitored installation, maintenance and selective collection of these products will neither degrade nor compromise the effectiveness of the habitat functions necessary for a healthy watershed—in fact it will enhance plant vigor and success, and improve habitat.

Consumers and community

Consumers get high quality products and services that are both healthy for them and restore the environment (rather than just protect it). NGOs would develop not only skills and technical capacity, but funding sources. A foundation will be developed to dispurse profits from product and services of the program and expand the program and to support community stewardship projects. Community benefits would include improved environmental health, skill development and job creation potential as well as tourism, educational and interpretive opportunities galore. Watershed Wealth products would create income, job opportunities, skill training, social program development (from volunteer environmental monitoring programs to business development for the unemployed). Random and destructive public access to WWC sites would be less than now, when much of the target land base is completely unsupervised. Working with environmental groups that fund conservation easements to develop standards allowing for carefully controlled commercial use of easement properties would greatly increase opportunities for the program.

Funders

In addition to habitat benefits and community social programs that will bring many participants into the habitat restoration process willingly, this program will provide several cost efficiencies to funders of environmental projects. Ongoing maintenance and monitoring, often the twin downfalls of restoration projects, become a self-sustaining economic activity and do not require continuous funding or management. The program is diverse enough in scope that there are significant funding leverage and synergistic partnership opportunities.