ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on freshwater ecosystem markets that exist, as opposed to the many that are conceptual or have merely been proposed. Wetlands and streams comprise the oldest ecosystem markets and continue to be the most active at the national scale. It focuses our discussion and examples on markets in North Carolina since they have been active for over a decade and have been the focus of several recent studies as well as recent federal and state regulation revisions. The chapter looks at habitat conservation banking, an emerging market that presents a new set of opportunities and challenges that will likely interact with these existing markets in the future. It describes the policies that created these markets, including those crafted at the federal, state, and local levels. The chapter presents a series of summary statistics that provide a sense of the scale of these markets.
