Building the Marketplace for LID: A New Habitat-Based Approach

While the low impact development (LID) community has made tremendous advances in limiting project impacts on site hydrology, there is much more that the LID community can do to incorporate habitat quality measures for fish and other species into their projects. To address the need for broader, ecologically based LID criteria, an organization called Salmon-Safe has developed a series of successful voluntary, market-based certification standards for industry that specifically encourage salmon-friendly design and management practices. Deployment of the Residential Standards indicates a new era for the LID community. Thoughtful development design, conducted in a manner that considers benefits to water quality and quantity as well as habitat quality and quantity, creates opportunities for LID-oriented developers and their development teams to provide new, certified products and market-based services that can set them apart from the competition.