Trading

"Point-Nonpoint Source Water Quality Trading: A Case Study in the Minnesota River Basin" 2005

Contrary to the general trend of only a few actual trades occurring within point-nonpoint source water quality trading programs in the United States, two trading projects in the Minnesota River Basin, created under the provisions of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits, have generated five major trades and numerous smaller ones. In this paper, these two projects are described to illustrate their origins, implementation, and results. It was found that several factors contributed to the relatively high number of trades in these projects, including the offsetting nature of the projects (hence a fixed number of credits that the point sources were required to obtain), readily available information on potential nonpoint source trading partners, and an effectively internal trading scheme used by one of the two projects. Read more..