By Emily Poole, SCNPS Upstate Advocacy Chair
On January 13, 2026, the South Carolina legislative session will begin again. This marks the second year of the current two-year session – the 119th Congress. The first session ran from January 3 to May 28, 2025. The second session just began on January 13 and will run through May 14, 2026.
The SCNPS Advocacy team will be hard at work alongside our partners in the South Carolina Conservation Coalition, which includes 50 organizations – among them in the Upstate are the Conestee Foundation, Friends of Reedy River, Naturaland Trust, Save Our Saluda, SC Environmental Law Project, and Upstate Forever. Together, along with individual citizens, we are advancing several legislative priorities in 2026 that impact the health of our ecosystem, where a thriving population of native plants is critical.
Priorities for the Current Legislative Session
Of course, we’ll keep you posted throughout the legislative session on how you can get involved and how you can use your voice to advocate for, restore, and protect the incredible natural resources in our state.
Building on the momentum and groundwork we and our partners laid in 2025, we will be working on several priorities, including:
Land Development: Advancing concurrency and transfer of development rights, which are growth management tools that local governments can use to direct development into areas equipped to handle it and steer growth away from rural areas, lands with conservation value (including habitat for native plants!), and already-overburdened infrastructure.
Wastewater Signage: Pushing for wastewater outfall signage requirements, which would lead to signs being posted at outfalls that discharge pollutants into our waterways. The signs would identify the outfall and provide basic permit information to the reader. Those who use and recreate within our state’s waters—such as an SCNPS member in a kayak or on a field trip near a river—will have the benefit of knowing where outfalls exist and will have easy access to a phone number posted on the sign for the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, where any concerns can be reported to.
Ecological Balance: Establishing the prothonotary warbler as South Carolina’s State Migratory Bird, which would recognize the species’ significant ecological and cultural importance. The prothonotary warbler is an eye-catching and endearing bird that migrates annually some 5,000 miles to and from South America to nest and breed in South Carolina. In 2025, this legislation passed the Senate, so it now needs to pass the House of Representatives. Elevating this species in our state gives us an opportunity to tell legislators why habitat protection matters and to explain the role native plants play in the habitats of species that make our state so special.
Prothonotary Warbler photograph by Mdf, edited by Fir0002 – Photographed by Mdf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=774888
