The Economic Case for Preserving America’s Wetlands

Nearly 30 years ago, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina. It was the most expensive natural disaster in state history—causing an estimated $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars and killing 37 people across the region. Raleigh took a direct hit, with the storm toppling thousands of trees and dumping nearly 9 inches of rain. In Rochester Heights, a historically Black neighborhood southeast of downtown, most homes were flooded.

This, as it turns out, wasn’t a freak accident. The neighborhood, built beginning in 1957, was among the first suburban enclaves marketed to Black families, who were excluded from other areas of then-segregated Raleigh. It was full of attractive, one-story brick homes with wide, grassy lawns. But because the low-lying neighborhood flanked a swamp that received untreated sewage discharge and stormwater runoff from downtown Raleigh, it was prone to flooding during storms. (Construction of Interstate 40 through the neighborhood more than a decade later made the problem worse.) Eventually, the 1972 Clean Water Act banned unpermitted disposal of raw sewage in wetlands, but by then the marshy land had become an illegal dumping ground for other waste, including tires, glass, and old appliances. One resident, 69-year-old Steve Blalock, who’s lived in the neighborhood for much of his life, recalls surfing the sewage discharge in a metal tub as a child.

After Fran, residents decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by local environmental advocate Norman Camp, a coalition of church and community members started cleaning up the wetland, pulling some 60 tons of garbage out of the swamp over the decades, the weight of around 10 African elephants. Eventually, with $1.2 million in funding, the city further restored the swamp and built an education center. Today, the wetland is home to beavers, mink, box turtles, and great blue herons. During my visit in November, the park’s assistant manager, Celia Lechtman, pointed out native plants such as arrow arum and jewelweed, and trees, including green ash, box elder, and red maple. For a time, according to community members, some of the worst flooding subsided.

The neighborhood’s revival is a blip of good news on a relatively bleak landscape. America’s wetlands were historically viewed as useless areas that stood in the way of development. More than half of the 221 million acres of wetlands that existed when Europeans settled have been destroyed, and six states—California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio—have lost at least 85 percent of their wetlands, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Wetlands act as “natural sponges,” absorbing up to an estimated 1.5 million gallons of water per acre, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they provide more than half of America’s $5.9 billion seafood harvest, including trout, bass, crab, shrimp, and oysters. They also filter pollutants from the water and sequester carbon dioxide. About half of our endangered and threatened species on wetlands.

As sea levels rise and climate change drives more intense storms, flooding is becoming increasingly damaging—and expensive. In 2024 alone, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that will cost at least $1 billion each to recover from, according to NOAA. “You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back floodwaters,” says Kelly Moser, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Indeed, according to a 2020 analysis of dozens of tropical storms along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, counties with more coastal wetlands coverage saw less damage, saving an average of more than $4.5 million per square mile (and a median of more than $235,000).

“You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back floodwaters.”

And yet, the destruction continues. Between 2009 and 2019, the United States lost about 1,047 square miles of wetlands, a 2024 FWS report notes—an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Making matters worse, in its 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority dramatically narrowed the definition of wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act to only those with a “continuous surface connection” to streams, oceans, rivers, or lakes—leading the EPA to exclude up to 63 percent of once-protected wetlands. Project 2025 would strip protections from even more of them.

Further exacerbating the problem, the US Army Corps of Engineers appears poised to expedite hundreds of industry permits that could affect wetlands under President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency.” And hundreds of federal employees at the primary agencies tasked with protecting wetlands—the EPA, FWS, and NOAA—were fired during Trump’s first weeks back in office.

Building energy infrastructure near wetlands is risky enough, but putting homes on wetlands is often a “double whammy,” explains Todd BenDor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies the environment and urban planning. Doing so can put people in potential flood zones while reducing the wetlands acreage that acts as a safeguard. North Carolina offers buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas. But for every buyout from 1996 to 2017, BenDor and his colleagues found that developers constructed 10 more homes in floodplains—just down the street from the bought-out homes, in some cases.

Flooding remains a problem in Rochester Heights. Restoring the wetland has likely helped, but it hasn’t been enough to make up for all the upstream development in Raleigh, which was crowned the nation’s third-fastest-growing large city last year. Rapid growth means more structures—homes, office buildings, hotels—and therefore more “impervious surfaces” for water to collect and run off into the creeks that feed the park. Wetlands, in other words, are among our best options for fighting flooding, but they can’t be the only solution.

Still, change is afoot. In Raleigh, as of 2023, city project managers are now required to consider the use of “green stormwater infrastructure,” such as rain gardens, green roofs, artificial wetlands, and permeable pavement, in construction. Under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, NOAA has doled out $985 million for coastal habitat protections, including wetlands. The Department of the Interior, which includes the National Park Service and FWS, separately announced hundreds of millions of dollars in ecosystem restoration funding, though it’s unclear whether these programs will continue under the Trump administration.

In the coming years, assistant park manager Lechtman hopes to see “significant changes” in Raleigh’s policies around unchecked development, including planting more native plant species throughout the city and creating opportunities for more kids—like Blalock’s grandchildren—to play and explore the wetland. “We, over generations, have done so much damage to this land,” she told me. “When we take a little bit of time to care for it, it really returns those gifts to us.”