Examining North Carolina's compensatory wetland mitigation program from the perspectives of land use planning and social equity

North Carolina's Ecosystem Enhancement Program (EEP) is responsible for providing the majority of compensatory stream and wetland mitigation sites throughout the state, including all off-site mitigation for the N.C. Department of Transportation. Two emerging criteria by which to assess the effectiveness of mitigation efforts include whether the mitigation process promotes social equity, and whether stream and wetland mitigation planning is coordinated with other types of land use planning. The first part of this study assesses the socioeconomic makeup of census tracts around impact sites in comparison to mitigation sites using two-tailed paired t-tests. The second part of the study maps the location of the EEP's accumulated advance mitigation sites in comparison to urban growth indicators by watershed around the state. The study finds that systematic socioeconomic disparities exist between communities that lose and gain streams and wetlands through the compensatory mitigation process. Streams and wetlands are systematically relocated from more advantaged to less advantaged communities. Communities near impact sites, as compared to those around mitigation sites, have higher total populations and population densities, higher percentages of whites and lower percentages of blacks and Hispanics, higher levels of education, lower poverty rates, higher median incomes, and higher median homes values. This finding warrants further consideration in both research and also state-level environmental policy. Additionally, growth indicators such as population growth rates and population growth projections do not significantly correlate with the amount of advance mitigation acquired by the EEP by watershed, implying that growth indicators are not effectively incorporated in the mitigation process. Thus, the EEP, the NC DOT and the Army Corps of Engineers have an opportunity to improve the efficiency of mitigation by more proactively and formally incorporating growth indicators and projections into the mitigation planning process.Master of City and Regional Plannin