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Sunday, June 24, 2012

Chicago River restoration, Chicago River gentrification?

Let's continue with our focus on species. The past couple of weeks I've talked about various mechanisms for conserving endangered species habitat - mitigation banking and The Conservation Registry. But habitat restoration work is often just as much about dealing with invasive species as it is with fostering natives. So what about the invasives?

The Chicago River certainly presents an interesting case of invasive species politics - it's the last "line in the sand - wait, water - the US government has set for the threatening, but by no means threatened, Asian carp. But what's fascinating about the case is that invasives like the carp play only one part in a whole drama over the river's restoration. A recent discussion on Windy City station WBEZ lays out the million $ question - will people ever swim and fish in the Chicago? The program's definitely worth a listen (thanks to Jessa Loomis for passing along the link!)

The most striking feature about the Chicago, I learned from listening, is that it now flows in the opposite direction of its pre-settlement course. That is, now it flows from Lake Michigan to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC), into the Des Plaines, and eventually the Mississippi. That's how the carp got into the system and how they are now threatening the Lake's fishery. Then there's the question of how much of a river the river really ought to be. Huh? My understanding is that the whole Chicago area used to be one big wetland that the river just kind of mozied its way through in the best (wettest) of years. (I think it's Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis that has a bit of interesting background on this aspect of Chicago's environmental history).

Participants on the WBEZ program did not, of course, suggest turning Chicago back into a wetland, and instead focused on a number of things wrong with and promising for the river. To start, the "Sanitary" in CSSC is one fat euphemism for the city's use of the river to send all of its crap downstream instead of into the lake. The biggest problem here is with the city's combined sewer system. You can think of a combined sewer system as, like the internet, a series of tubes and these tubes take in both all the sewage and surface runoff. When it rains enough, Chi-town can't sanitize all the inflow and some is dumped straight into the river. In Chicago - it being a decent-sized urban area with your standard set of impervious surfaces - you get a lot more runoff from heavy rains than you would from, say, a prairie (thinking here, too, about climate change exacerbating extreme weather events...) Apparently water quality standards are now in place for the river, by which I think the WBEZ program host means to say that under section 303 of the Clean Water Act, (IL?) EPA has finally gotten around to designating the river as potentially swimmable and fishable and will require polluters like the City of Chicago to help make it that way. Still, as anyone familiar with the enforcement of any environment regulation might be able to guess, whether - and how - these standards can be acted upon successfully is another matter. Even the show's title sounds skeptical - will people ever actually recreate on the river (even with these new standards)?

Then there's the issue of reversing the flow - err..."re-reversing" the flow. I'm not sure about the ecology of flow reversal. Reversal would stop shipping Chicago's shit down to the Gulf of Mexico, and potentially cut off the carp, but it might not serve the lake well. At any rate, there's probably some huge political barriers to flow reversal. The WBEZ radio host played a clip of  IL Senator Dick Durbin naming the political problem as the Army Corps of Engineers - it would take them too long and too much money to permit flow reversal and to actually get around to doing it.

Less ambitious restoration efforts are focusing on river recreation and neighborhood development along the river. One of the radio guests was a professor who taught a design class at Harvard where students came up with various plans for the river. On the river system side, students found that there's potential to re-meander the river a bit and add in some wetlands as part of new parklands. Maybe, eventually, people could even fish away the Asian carp from some of these parks. Then there's a whole bunch of abandoned warehouses and factories along the river that might make for new housing that could be tied into riverwalks and bike paths and the like.

But here's what I'm bringing it all back to: All of the physical design stuff sounds good - disinfecting discharge, re-reversing flow, and freeing up the river channel - but who does the "social restoration" of the river - the parks, the bike paths, and the boat houses - really benefit? The answer to this kind of big question is always case or place specific, as geographers know. It's too soon to tell for Chicago. One of the program participants named developments on the river - like the kinda new, recently expanded Ping Tom Park - as a sort of "river gentrification". That's an interesting notion - the idea that, as with neighborhood gentrification, new development might come at the expense of established residents and uses and primarily to the benefit of new ones. But it's not something the program guests dug into all. It's these kind of "fuzzy" questions that are worth asking right now.

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Next week: I'll probably try to figure out what the recent international Rio+20 conference on sustainable development will mean for ecosystem service politics in the US. Epic fail? Big win for green accounting? Stay tuned...

Monday, June 18, 2012

User-generated natures? The Conservation Registry

Let's continue with the story of the rare red-bearded Jackson County song lark (an endangered bird I made up; see the last post.). As a landowner, USFWS has let you bank mitigation credits for having restored some of the bird's habitat. At first, you're of course happy with your work - you've helped save the endangered species! After a few months, though, you get to thinking, does it really matter? Isn't my farm and this habitat I've created just in a tumultuous sea of non-habitat for the bird? You slip into a deep depression...

Here comes the Conservation Registry to the rescue! On the Conservation Registry website, landowners, project managers, and agency staff can post and view details on all sorts of restoration projects. The idea is to help those concerned with the success of restoration work to understand the context of their work - does your song lark project link up with others in the landscape? Is it in a priority area?

As the website explains it, the Registry was started in 2008 and originally focused on the Pacific Northwest - Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. It seems that much of the early work and core partnerships grew out of Oregon specifically, i.e. Defenders of Wildlife, Institute for Natural Resources, TNC Oregon, and The Other Firm. Since 2008 the Registry has expanded nationwide and indeed, it now seems to be hosting a ton of projects. Open up the map and you'll see a huge orange blob spreading across the US (notably absent, though, in the SW). Zoom in and of course you see the orange blob disintegrate into individual markers and sometimes polygons. A very preliminary examination tells me that a lot of these are national crop conservation programs  - like the Wetland Reserve Program - that were probably plugged in from some big NRCS database. The WRP is important to have on there, but certainly it does not account for all the restoration work going on. The Registry has a lot of potential, but how to continue to get projects on the site is a big question.

Here's what I'm bringing it back to: what sort of nature are we making out there when we do restoration and conservation? I'd argue nature isn't just that new sine-wave stream, riparian planting, or protected prairie, but the portrayal of those projects online and in code. I don't want to be abstract about this; I think the digitality of restoration really really matters. The digital life of a given project allows it to be seen - by other landowners, by agencies, by potential credit purchasers - and seen in particular ways for various ends. A project's representation online - especially its geocoding onto a Google Map layer - allows it to be put in a landscape context for all these folks to see and ultimately to act upon - be it by, for example, choosing to add - or not - another riparian planting to the watershed or changing funding priorities.

The Conservation Registry targets not just big NRCS data but individual land managers, so the "we" in the question: what nature are we making? is important. What are the similarities and differences between your average joe tweeting about or in, say, Lexington, KY and an individual landowner uploading a Cane Run creek restoration report onto the Registry? A growing set of geographers, best represented by FloatingSheep.org, might have some answers: they're taking long-standing concerns about cultural landscapes and thinking about the representation of place on and the spatiality of Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr, etc. (aside: perhaps something like the wild Bluegrass floating sheep would have made for a more interesting ESA example above...) Personally, I'm wondering not just about these user-generated spaces/places but user-generated natures. As Monica Stephens from Floating Sheep asks: what happens when men contribute disproportionately to Open Street Map? (hint: the picture of the world you get includes more stripclubs than daycare centers), we might ask: who is contributing to the Conservation Registry? NRCS staff with their WRP data? Local watershed councils? What kind of restoration is visible?


What's clear so far from the Conservation Registry is that the space of nature matters. Conservationists need to able to see watersheds and habitat corridors/fragments. Ultimately the line of inquiry suggested here is to look into the work going into coding nature/space. Red-bearded song larks and floating sheep are at stake.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Risky business: pre-compliance mitigation in habitat and water quality

Imagine you are a landowner in, say, southwestern Oregon. Turns out that on your land lives the rare red-bearded Jackson County song lark (a bird that I made up. Threatened species always have the best names, don't they? Some folk may be partial to charismatic megafauna, but I'm a fan of what I guess you could call eccentric microspecies.) The bird's not yet regulated under the US Endangered Species Act - it's just a candidate - but it might be listed soon if the WildEarth Guardians' lawsuit goes through. You're inclined to protect it anyway and guess what, USFWS is going to let you restore more of its habitat and then sell credits to developers elsewhere who are destroying its habitat.

The basic idea behind the concept of pre-compliance mitigation is to provide land managers with incentives to do conservation and to encourage developers (a name I use generically for anyone making a habitat impact) to fund that work. In a PowerPoint, Alice Appleton from the new-ish USDA Office of Environmental Markets names ESA pre-compliance trading as one of 4 or 5 conservation markets already existing in the US (others being Clean Water Act 404 wetland/stream banking, TMDL water quality trading, listed species banking, and carbon offsets). In the presentation Appleton suggests ecosystem markets like ESA banking can be useful for:
  • Compensating landowners for the ecosystem services they provide on their private lands
  • Investing private funds in natural infrastructure
  • Reducing societal costs of regulatory compliance
  • Encouraging innovation
  • Improving the effectiveness of practices 
  • …bringing real, verifiable conservation to scale
Interest in pre-compliance mitigation seems to be growing as agencies figure out ways of accounting for what they can't legally account for (e.g. non-point source water pollution or unlisted species; also voluntary carbon offsets may be a distinct case of pre-compliance mitigation, or maybe they were pre-2010 when federal cap and trade schemes were still on the table) and as they try to, as OEM notes, reduce the costs of regulation. As far as I can tell there are two different pre-compliance programs actually in the works: ESA pre-compliance, like the red-bearded Jackson County song lark scenario, and water quality. How pre-compliance mitigation looks differs between the two, but the concept of "regulatory relief" is at the heart of both.

The idea of creating or restoring habitat for endangered species, as one might do with wetlands for wetland mitigation banks, has been around for a while. However, on the ground projects seem to exist only in California, and just recently in Oregon. A lot, but certainly not all, of these seem to be for fish, especially salmon (see especially Salmon Safe and the Willamette Partnership's "tri-fecta" of incentives). Becca Madsen notes that ESA banking is likely to be a top issue for mitigators in 2012 because of Interior's agreement, in the face of lawsuits like the one mentioned above, to list over 200 species - what the New York Times calls the biggest change in ESA enforcement since the early 90s (spotted owl times). Pre-compliance could come out of that court settlement in a large way as developers realize the costs of having to deal with the new listings.

The thought of providing land managers with relief from water quality (nutrients, e.g.) regulation has been around since at least 2005-6, but for all I know, longer. Last summer USDA and EPA drafted a "certainty framework" that outlines what pre-compliance conservation might look like for water quality standards. It's not clear what the main driver would be, though one could guess it would be TMDLs. As with most water quality programs, it's up to the states to figure out specifics. and there are two state-level programs that I've heard of: Minnesota's and Michigan's. Michigan's is older, pre-dating the framework. However, the sense I get of the Michigan program is that it is less about reducing farmers' liabilities from water quality nutrient/temperature/sediment regs like a TMDL as much as it: 1) reduces liabilities from other rules on for instance pesticide handling; 2) is basically a good practices certification program like GAP. Apparently you can also buy a t-shirt with the program's logo. Minnesota's seems to be more of a relief program where farmers get "immunity" from the state's water quality standards by performing certain conservation activities. These activities are not yet set, but technical advisory committees will be forming them soon.

But here's a true point: what's ultimately fascinating about pre-compliance banking is that at the same time it represents some form of "regulatory relief" for develoers, and thus a supposed withdrawal of government from the business of mandating conservation (as it "mandated" firm-specific tech controls on water quality before allowing water quality trading), pre-compliance banking is also a re-assertion of agency involvement. Of course anyone familiar with mitigation in the US knows that it's all about agencies' regulatory drivers. Yet in this case, the regulatory driver doesn't yet exist. The temporal dimension here is key: a new kind of ecosystem governance is emerging that is done on the basis of what might happen in the future. And this uncertainty, I think, is what makes pre-compliance mitigation tricky, for three reasons. First, it involves agency staff in determining what they think would count as mitigation activity and then enforcing the verification of those activities and outcomes. Second, listing a species is a long and unsure process rife with lawsuits and lobbying. Related, and third - as some agency officials argue, the goal of pre-compliance mitigation is to allow trading in credits in habitat for potentially listed species, so that those species ultimately don't have to be listed. But as a developer, does it pay to engage in voluntarily conserving a species that might not actually be listed, especially if other firms buy credits and build up the species population? We might ask the same for farmers' efforts to reduce runoff - won't others improve water quality enough? In the end the question is: what's more risky or worth the time - lobbying to prevent a listing, letting others choose to buy credits, or buying a credit/doing mitigation yourself?

These are the sort of dilemmas that developers, land managers, and agencies will have to answer going forward.

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Note: This pre-compliance conservation is different, though related, from the similarly named conservation compliance. Conservation compliance is the requirement that farmers take certain measures to prevent soil erosion, protect habitat, save wetlands, etc. in exchange for receiving government subsidies. It's become a cornerstone of debate in this year's Farm Bill - direct subsidies to farms are likely on their way out, replaced by subsidizing crop insurance, but conservation compliance hasn't been attached to insurance subsidies yet. In both pre-compliance conservation and conservation compliance, however, the basic idea is to encourage voluntary conservation. Of course there is always some form of coercion lurking in the background (we'll regulate it soon anyway/do it or you won't get your money...)

UPDATE: Chesapeake Bay WQT

Check out this Washington Post article on the politics of trading nutrients in the Bay - environmental groups are split on whether to support it or not and funders are not so happy with those opposed: “If you challenge nutrient trading, you’re done. You won’t be funded by us anymore.”

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Chesapeake Bay WQT: a geography of rules

Becca Madsen at Madsen Environmental wrote recently about a new report on water quality trading (WQT) in the Chesapeake Bay. The RTI report finds a lot of possible efficiencies that could come from trading in the Bay and a lot of potential demand for credits. But, as Madsen writes, noticing the existence of very few trades so far, "what about actual demand?" The lack of trading so far in the Bay seems to be an interesting case where the geography of the rules of the market matters for its success.

WQT promises to lower overall nutrient levels in waters by allowing regulated point sources of pollution (think wastewater treatment facilities) to buy credits, or representations of nutrient or even temperature reductions, from other sources, point or non-point (think crop farmers), that have installed technologies or performed best management practices (BMPs) that control nutrient/temperature loadings. The idea is that trading can be a more efficient way for these sources to reduce their impact than government telling them to install costly technology. Regulation is key here in two senses: those wastewater treatment facilities might not have any reason to control their N/P emissions but for EPA mandate. Regulation is also important in the sense that the state-specific rules on who can trade what with whom, when, and how. State departments of environmental quality or environmental protection list creditable actions (BMPs), control trading between sectors of polluters and between watersheds, and create trading ratios that tell potential credit buyers how many extra credits they have to buy in order to account for the uncertainty in knowing exactly how much pollution that installed BMP reduced.

The promise of WQT has been around for a while, but figuring out the right mix of rules to make it work has been a project around just as long. In 2003 EPA formalized some rules for how WQT might be done, but left it up to individual watersheds and states to figure out specifics and implementation on their own. A report the following year (2004) shows there were a lot of trading initiatives already in the works. Some of the ones listed never really got off the ground (e.g. Lake Dillon). In the Chesapeake Bay specifically, there's been a lot of hope for nutrient trading for way longer than I've been thinking about any of this.

As a couple of the contributors to a whole special issue in JAWRA last year noted, the "reality and rhetoric" of WQT can of course be two different things. Getting the reality right (if that makes sense) depends a lot on the context - institutional histories and inclinations, geographies, and drivers - in each trading program.

Indeed, the variation in success between Bay states is telling. Some have seen a few trades, others, like Virginia, none at all. Pennsylvania is the most successful and has been trading long before the most recent phase of the TMDL went into effect (its program started in late 2006). There have been many trades, and many traders, in the state. One in particular, the Red Barn Trading Company, is perhaps the only company to have started up directly in response to the creation of the Pennsylvania market. It aggregates credits generated by moving manure out of the watershed.

Even the success of the Pennsylvania program is not without its shortcomings. As Alexandra Chiaruttini wrote in a summary of last year's WQT activity, the way that the credit sale process is organized is prohibitive. It's an auction, facilitated by Markit, and the timing of each auction and the blind bid requirement, she argues, limit small credit sellers from joining the market.

So state-level WQT program designs are idiosyncratic and tricky. Where does the variation between states in trading levels come from? A report from WRI last year highlighted significant differences in the ways Bay states define the lifespan of a credit/debit and in implementing what kind and what size of trading ratios. Not agreeing on these basics makes it harder, if not impossible, for a credit produced in, say, Pennsylvania to be certified for trade to a debtor in West Virginia. At the 2011 Ecosystem Markets meeting in Madison, a poster presenter on Bay trading noted that only Maryland and Delaware have agreed to allow credit trades cross their state borders and agency boundaries.

As Ecosystem Marketplace author Steve Zwick bluntly claimed, "such a fragmented approach simply doesn't work in a shared body of water." Some of the contributors to the JAWRA special issue focused their comments on the geography of trading - what's the scale that works for watershed restoration and conservation? (This is not just a question for nutrient markets, but ecosystem service markets in general.) That question is something the Willamette Partnership in Oregon is thinking about and working hard on as well.

Whether the patchwork of Bay trading rules matters in the long-run is of course yet to be seen. It'll be interesting to compare the Bay program with EPRI's scaled-up eight state Ohio River Basin WQT Project. As Madsen writes in her notes from the recent National Mitigation and Ecosystem Banking conference, EPRI bills its project as the "world's first consensus agreement on interstate trading". Farmers in states like my own, Kentucky, would be able to trade with power plants in, say, Pennsylvania. Hopefully the Bay (and the Ohio River Basin) can get its reality right, because as one analyst said about Bay restoration, "Markets are the framework for everything that we do in our society – so we'll do it with markets, or we won't do it at all."