The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed a new rule that would institute federal baseline water quality standards (WQS) for the waters on over 250 Tribal lands throughout the country.
Water quality standards are the bedrock of the pollution controls required by the Clean Water Act, and are crucial to protecting environmental integrity and human health. For example, water quality standards are used to control pollution discharges through the Act’s permitting systems and to identify and restore polluted waters. Yet today, the United States is home to over 300 Tribes with reservations, but only 47 have EPA-approved water quality standards.
That is why EPA must quickly act to extend the same Clean Water Act safeguards that currently exist in the rest of the United States to Tribal waters that currently lack protections.
EPA estimates that its proposed rule will protect roughly “76,000 miles of rivers and streams and 1.9 million acres of lakes and reservoirs that lack Clean Water Act standards.” This rule will establish water quality requirements for reservations, facilitate Tribal participation in managing water quality, provide a basis for enforcement, and protect reservation waters from upstream pollutant discharges.
Establishing water quality standards that are protective of Tribal reserved rights and resources also supports healthier ecosystems, and ultimately, cleaner waters for everyone.
