Before people settled along the bayous, when Houston was not yet Houston, the wetlands stretching across the Southeastern Texas coast were covered with prairie potholes and pimple mounds. These sunken freshwater holes and small knolls dotted the landscape, providing a home for tall prairie grasses and a host of wildlife.
Over time, however, the land was developed. For years, encroaching urban sprawl decimated thousands of acres of coastal prairie wetlands in Texas. Since the mid-1990s, the complex pothole and pimple system shrank by thousands of acres, according to reports, and continues to be developed, alarming residents, environmentalists and climate experts.
“A lot has changed,” said Erin Kinney, senior research scientist and manager of coastal resilience and communities at Houston Advanced Research Center. “When I started working on wetlands in 2011, I watched it all go in real time.”
Texas has the fifth largest inventory of wetlands in the country, encompassing just over 2% of the entire state and 3.9 million acres. However, there are few protections for these ecosystems. There is a serious lack of regulations at the state level, and any rules on the books are riddled with development-friendly loopholes. Moreso, recent and ongoing rollbacks by the Trump administration have drained existing laws of any influence, leaving advocates with little to stand on.
And it’s not just Texas. The entire United States is under threat of wetland loss, with other states, such as Louisiana and Florida, facing similar devastation. Critics of these regulatory changes stress the importance of wetlands for flood management in areas that are prone to river and coastal flooding. In the Houston area, rainfall intensity has increased by 22% since 1970, and experts predict tropical storms will likely become stronger and more erratic with time.
All of this is alarming to Kinney, who for years has studied the impact of the dwindling wetlands in the Gulf Coast region. She moved to the area around Kemah, south of Houston, and witnessed the freshwater wetlands being filled in around her. The effects became more pronounced to her after Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017 when residents reported that they had never been flooded before that catastrophic storm arrived.
“Houston is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. We’ve been developing more and more,” Kinney said. “But most of these wetlands are not being protected in any way.”
Draining the Wetlands
Wetlands have long provided natural flood resilience for communities along the pimple and pothole system — the name for the tiny prairie mounds and divots pocketing the southern United States. When summer storms hit the coast, the wetlands naturally retain the water, filling, filtering and then gradually draining into the creeks and Galveston Bay — leading to their nickname as the world’s “kidney.”
But as freshwater wetlands are filled in and paved over by development, there becomes nothing to prevent the floodwater from storms or rain events from quickly flowing to the creeks and bayous. The result is more intense flooding, serious erosion and higher floodwaters. For example, in 2017, wetlands protected parts of the East Coast from over $625 million worth of flood damage during Hurricane Sandy.
“In Texas, wetland loss can be a little bit like a death by a thousand cuts.”
– Suzanne Simpson, land protection director, Galveston Bay Foundation
A recent report published in Nature Water found that wetland loss has increased residential flood insurance by an estimated $10 billion across the country since 1985. The regions with the highest rates of wetland loss were Houston, southeastern Louisiana, coastal Florida and the area around League City, just south of Houston.
Between 1985 and 2023, the region between Houston and Galveston lost nearly 19,000 acres of wetlands, according to the report. This loss occurred mostly to make room for urban sprawl and development.
Moreso, development has increased over time. Between 1996 and 2016, 0.83% of wetlands in Galveston County were lost. This percentage nearly doubled between 2016 and 2021 to 1.45%, according to a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration database.
“It’s not like a giant big bad (development) project that grabs a bunch of headlines. A lot of times, it’s small projects that impact a certain number of wetlands,” said Suzanne Simpson, director of land protection for the Galveston Bay Foundation. “In Texas, wetland loss can be a little bit like a death by a thousand cuts.”
For decades, wetlands have been protected through federal jurisdiction over “navigable waters,” defined in the Clean Water Act as the “waters of the United States.” The Act is meant to maintain safe water and prevent pollution. In Texas, a state with no wetland protections, federal regulations are the only barrier between development and conservation.
However, the definition of which waters are actually protected and whether that includes all wetlands has been up for debate since the early 2000s. In the past five years, the definition has been noticeably altered.
Most recently, the Trump administration proposed weakening wetland protections in late 2025. The proposed rule, which is currently under review, requires wetlands to contain surface water through “the wet season” — the time of year when a region gets the most rain. Such a requirement would prevent as much as 91% of nontidal wetlands from receiving Clean Water Act protections, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund. Tidal wetlands are flooded by ocean tides.
The proposed change comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that wetlands must have a “continuous surface connection” with traditional navigable waters, like a river or lake. This ruling particularly impacted freshwater wetlands that may sit farther away from larger bodies of water. In the court case, Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency, the plaintiffs wanted to fill in some land, but the EPA ordered them to stop because the wetland on their lot was protected.
The Sacketts sued, arguing that the land was separated from the nearby lake by a road. They won the case when the Supreme Court reversed a decision by a lower court.
“It’s really narrowed the scope of what we understood wetlands to be and what sort of tests you need to pass in order for something to be considered a wetland,” Simpson said. “And with that reduced scope, it ends up that you have some wetlands that are still as wet and ecologically functional as ever, but don’t enjoy the same protections as they have in the past.”
Wetlands can be ephemeral by nature, critics argued. After a storm they can fill up with water — which filters and slowly drains — and then dry up seasonally. The connection they have with larger bodies of water could grow in heavy rain, or in some cases, or could be under the ground rather than above.
The Sackett case was a major blow to the protection of the Prairie Pothole Wetlands south of Houston, according to Kinney, which were in the process of being developed.
“Wetlands are not the most visible kind of habitat poster child in Texas. They have a PR problem.”
– Erin Kinney, senior research scientist and manager of coastal resilience and communities, Houston Advanced Research Center.
“We were arguing that they were a special wetland of special significance, and when Sackett went through, that took the legs off that whole argument because they were not visually connected to Galveston Bay,” said Kinney.
In response to these changes, some states are crafting new regulations to protect their wetlands. In Colorado, legislators approved a vast array of protections for state streams and wetlands in late 2025, and in New Mexico, regulators enacted a new permitting framework in 2025 to cover the gap left by the federal government. Most recently, Delaware’s governor signed a bill creating the state’s first program protecting freshwater wetlands from development.
But in Texas, there is currently no legislative movement for protection of wetlands and the loss is noticeable, said Kinney.
“A lot of people don’t understand them and don’t appreciate them,” said Kinney. “Wetlands are not the most visible kind of habitat poster child in Texas. They have a PR problem.”
Loopholes in Mitigation
Alenka Cardenas has for years been following development projects in the Galveston Bay Watershed through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permitting system.
If a developer has the potential to impact a wetland with a construction project, it must submit an application to the Army Corps for a permit. The developer will describe how the wetland impacts are being addressed, either by avoiding the wetland entirely or by offsetting the loss, according to federal regulations.
The developer must show that it is maintaining the total wetland acreage and ecological functions in an environmental credit called mitigation banks. This means that for whatever is lost, another natural area is restored or preserved. However, Cardenas, the wetlands policy outreach specialist for the Bayou City Waterkeeper, said the process isn’t so straightforward.
“If you’re going to destroy or alter a wetland in one area and it’s a giant 800 acres and you’re taking away 100 acres, but then you go 300 miles away and restore a wetland in a forest, it’s not the same thing,” Cardenas said. “The larger wetland you’ve taken away from had a bigger impact.”
But for Cardenas, that’s not even the biggest issue. Developers can submit a permit without exact information on how they plan to offset or avoid the wetland, she said. And the permit will still be approved without it.
“In the permit, [the developer] will say, ‘We will determine the type and compensatory mitigation’ but they haven’t actually done it,” Cardenas said. “Or they will say, ‘We are avoiding and minimizing’ and that’s it, no more information.”
In response, the United States Government Accountability Office published a report in April that noted the Army Corps of Engineers “lacked sufficient information to support how assurances [for mitigation] were established.” The agency recommended that the Corps develop new guidance to address mitigation requirements.
In a statement, the Army Corps said the agency “continues to evaluate and improve its regulatory processes and guidance, including mitigation requirements, consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”
Overall, the Clean Water Act does not prevent development from happening, said Simpson, and regions like the Houston area are still seeing developments in coastal areas despite flooding, sea level rise and intensifying storms. But, by and large, the regulations have certainly reduced the net rate of loss across the country, she said.
For some wetland advocates, the solutions may come from working with developers to protect wetlands. The best mitigation strategy, they say, is to leave the wetlands as they are, uninterrupted, so the question becomes how can saving wetlands work for everyone.
Justin Kozak, the nature-based solutions manager for The Nature Conservancy in Texas, worked with the Texas Water Development Board on a flood resiliency project. While there is no ongoing effort to create state regulations, the team produced a guidebook for nature-based solutions in Texas, including working around and with wetlands rather than filling them in.
In one example, the Clear Lake City Water Authority near Houston converted a former golf course to a park with 40 acres of dedicated wetlands called Exploration Green. The area is designed to hold 500 million gallons of stormwater to protect nearby homes from seasonal flooding, and it succeeded. During Hurricane Harvey, the community escaped flooding.
“It’s a more holistic view on things that recognizes where environmental and natural systems can carry the weight rather than paying for flood reliance,” Kozak said. “Wetlands do the work for us. They’re wet for a reason.”
