Native Brook Trout Near Boston Protected With Business Support

Corporate commitment to conserving, protecting, and replenishing water in business operations and in the environment is growing. The challenge to investing in water outside the four walls of those businesses? Connecting to meaningful activities and projects in watersheds, at the local level.

It is projects like the environmental flow and restoration of Pine Tree Brook in Milton, Massachusetts, that are eligible for support through an innovative new platform designed to help bridge the gap between corporate funders and NGO projects. Since 2017, River Network and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) have partnered on the Business for Water Stewardship Project Bank.

Pine Tree Brook flows from the Blue Hills Reservation to the edge of Boston. “To my knowledge, it’s the only natural trout stream that borders a major metropolitan city in the Eastern United States,” says Chris Hirsch, an environmental scientist with the Neponset River Watershed Association, the group leading the project. “This makes it a very special and unique brook, and a priority of ours for restoration.” They first learned about the Project Bank through email outreach from River Network.

The Pine Tree Brook project aims to protect a rare population of native brook trout. The brook’s headwaters are mostly intact, but three dams in the headwaters “make life harder for the brook trout that call Pine Tree Brook home,” says Hirsch. Located just two and a half miles from Boston, the trout population is […]