4 Wetland Mitigation Concepts Explained via Memes

The concept and practice of wetland mitigation banking is complicated to explain and understand. I thought I’d present key concepts using internet memes.

Concept 1: the Mitigation Hierarchy

The mitigation hierarchy is a concept used to explain how and when it’s acceptable to impact a natural resource and pay someone else to restore &/or protect it somewhere else. Here’s how it goes. A natural resource law prohibits impacts to wetlands/endangered species/biodiversity/native vegetation, but provides exceptions through a permitting process. To avoid the scenario where just about anyone can get a ‘license to trash’ the environment, so long as they write out a check or make it all better somewhere else, the permit process provides hurdles. One: you’ve got to show that you avoided impact to X natural resources. Two: you’ve got to show that you minimized impacts. Then and only then will the regulators consider letting you mitigate do compensatory mitigation* [note: they call it ‘offset’ outside the US].

*EPA’s official sequence is Avoid, Minimize, Compensate; with compensatory mitigation defined as “restoration, establishment, enhancement, or in certain circumstances preservation of wetlands, streams or other aquatic resources for the purpose of offsetting  unavoidable adverse impacts.”

Concept 2: How the Mitigation is Done

Mitigation generally means restoration, enhancement, creation, and preservation of a natural resource. So for wetlands, what is often served up as mitigation is nice piece of degraded wetlands, restored with some un-ditching or dam-busting, curvy-stream building, and water-loving plants. Who does the restoration? It’s either do-it-yourself (called permittee-responsible mitigation), or done by someone else–either an in-lieu fee program (a government agency or non-profit organization), or a mitigation bank (a for-profit company). The latter two types of mitigation accept funds and provide larger-scale restoration. Mitigation lands must be permanently protected by a conservation easement.

3. No Net Loss

Since a presidential mandate in the late 1980’s under  the Bush (H.W.) administration, the US has had a policy goal of “no net loss” of wetlands. Don’t impact more than you restore. But numerous studies have shown that ecologically, wetland mitigation isn’t as good as keeping what you’ve got in the first place. Here’s a meta-analysis (note that bigger restoration does better). For mitigation banks, I’ve often noticed a distaste that someone would make a profit on environmental restoration that comes at the cost of a loss of natural resources. The alternative then, is 1) to protest against issuance of permits to impact wetlands in the first place, and/or 2) to ensure that mitigation banks are held to standards as high as mitigation provided from government or non-profit sources. Ironically, mitigation bankers argued that other sources of mitigation were held to standards lower than theirs and successfully lobbied for equivalent standards in 2008 regulations. Bankers also note that they have a record of meeting 98% of their performance standards.

4. Wetland Mitigation Banking 102: Credit Stacking

Go to any conference on wetland mitigation banking or any other environmental market and there will be at least one session on credit stacking. This is a largely theoretical discussion about the opportunity for multiple credits (and implied, multiple payments) for multiple ecosystem services that a piece of land provides. If a land provides wetland functions and values AND endangered species habitat, why shouldn’t you be allowed to create multiple credits? You can, in some situations, but the criticism will come when you try to sell multiple credits without proof of additional services, functions, or financial investment.

So there you go. Four key wetland mitigation concepts. Here’s a bonus Neil deGrasse Tyson meme I made but I couldn’t figure where it belonged.