Land Stewardship
Preserved Land Forests Farmland
Inland Wetlands
In Connecticut, inland wetlands are defined as land, including submerged land (not including tidal wetlands) “which consists of any of the soil types designated as poorly drained, very poorly drained, alluvial, and floodplain by the National Cooperative Soil Survey, as may be amended from time to time, of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)”.29
Implementation of the inland wetlands law has been problematic.
In 1972, the state legislature enacted the Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Act (IWWA), which provides a regulatory process to protect wetlands. Activities that are likely to affect inland wetlands and watercourses are regulated by each town’s municipal inland wetlands agency and can include filling, piping, channelizing, or otherwise temporarily or permanently altering inland wetlands and watercourses; however, there is no standard requirement for regulation of the upland area adjacent to identified wetlands. Upland areas surrounding wetlands or wetland buffers help to protect water quality by filtering pollutants and trapping sediment, providing wildlife habitat, and mitigating flooding.
A report by the Council in 2008, Swamped, identified a number of problems with how the IWWA was being implemented. Though some improvements have been made, such as the provision of online training* and the availability of an electronic complaint reporting form to file a coastal or inland water resource complaint, issues remain related to efficient implementation.:
- The requirement that at least one member of a municipal inland wetlands agency be trained was not tracked, which was due, in part, to the limited staff resources at the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) assigned to assist municipal wetland agency officials, and the registration for the online training does not require information, such as municipality, role, or affiliation. In 2025, there were 178 total registrants for online training and 114 participants completed the course and earned certificates.30
- Through 2025, data that were required to be submitted by municipalities on the actions of their inland wetlands agencies were still not submitted and automatically entered into a database. This required the limited staff resources at DEEP to transfer the data that DEEP receives on written or emailed forms into a database manually.**
Wetlands serve many functions, one of them being their unique ability to store and sequester carbon. Forested wetlands, which comprise most of the inland wetlands in the state, serve as important carbon sinks and sequester carbon as organic matter (both above and below ground). The substantial extent of forested wetlands across the state is important to greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategies and incorporated into inland wetland protection efforts in Connecticut.31
NEW! Public Act 25-73, Section 2 requires that on and after January 1, 2026, each member of an inland wetlands agency and persons employed by a municipality as staff to such agency must complete the comprehensive training made available by DEEP; the training be undertaken within one year of an appointment or hiring; the training be retaken every four years or once during the official’s term; and the local wetland agency submit an annual statement affirming compliance with the training requirements to their board of selectmen or legislative body.
NEW! Public Act 25-12 established a working group within the legislative branch to identify where and how protection of vegetated riparian buffers in the state can be incorporated into statutes and regulations.
Technical Note: *The online training program fulfills the training requirement pursuant to CGS Section 22a-42(d). **DEEP launched a new online reporting form in February 2026 to collect activity reporting forms from the municipalities.
29 Connecticut General Statutes (CGS) Sec. 22a-38 (15); www.cga.ct.gov/current/pub/chap_440.htm#sec_22a-38.
30 DEEP, personal communication from K. O’Neill, January 29, 2026.
31 DEEP, Final Report: Working and Natural Lands Working Group, Wetlands Subgroup, November 2020; portal.ct.gov/-/media/DEEP/climatechange/GC3/GC3-working-group-reports/GC3_WNL_Wetlands_Final_Report_111320.pdf#page=11#page=11.