Green Wombat

Attention Wall Street types and financial entrepreneurs keen to go green. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced they’re hooking up to promote water quality trading markets.

The idea is to clean up rivers, lakes and oceans by letting those who restore wetlands and reduce agricultural runoff to sell credits to sewage treatment plants and other facilities required to maintain water quality levels under the federal Clean Water Act. In other words, if Big City Sewage Plant can’t or won’t meet its water quality targets it can buy credits from Farmer Brown who has gone organic and thus slashed the amount of contaminants running from her land into a nearby river. Pollutants such as nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment can be traded.

Here’s the green to be made: while there are a few scattered water quality trading markets around, there’s a business to be built in setting up and brokering these markets. That means opportunities for consultants, traders and software engineers. The feds hope to provide $3 million in funding for such markets in 2007.