StormStore.org is Live!

February 18, 2022 / News

Toward the end of 2021, while the Metropolitan Planning Council was preparing to launch a new website, StormStore.org, contractors in the Village of Franklin Park were finishing construction for one of the first projects that would be featured on and stand to benefit from this website. Yet, a passerby might not have realized the significance of this effort: a civil engineer passing the site would have recognized a typical stormwater detention basin, or maybe, while a neighbor might have only seen a tidy hole in the ground. Neither would have known this project, developed under the leadership of Mayor Barret Pedersen, is one of the initial projects in the nation’s first stormwater detention trading market—a climate market for managing Illinois’ increasingly frequent and intense rainfall—that stands to generate revenue to the Village for managing rainwater where it falls.

StormStore™, an MPC partnership with The Nature Conservancy, is helping communities like Franklin Park understand and tap into the benefits of stormwater management with the launch of StormStore.org. Visitors to this newly updated website can learn how typical stormwater assets can generate revenue and spark economic development while also reducing problematic local flooding. The website is focused on providing core functionality to visitors, who can use StormStore.org to:

Determine project eligibility using site address or map location,

Get answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the pilot program, and

Connect with the StormStore team to get technical support, or discuss project eligibility.

Originally conceived as a highly-interactive trading portal, the StormStore team scaled back this first iteration of this website to complement the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s stormwater detention and volume control trading webpage and provide practical information not readily available to market stakeholders. In the coming months, StormStore.org will expand provide easy to access information about available credits, as well as projects still in the early stage of development and contacts for other interested parties. If you would like to be listed on this registry, discuss a potential project, or state your interest in buying stormwater credits, please contact the StormStore team today.

Whether you are a developer who would like to reduce the cost of construction or free up more land for development, or you are a community group interested in bringing nature-based solutions to your neighborhood, StormStore.org is your first stop to understand how you might be part of the innovative environmental market place.