I've assembled a non-exhaustive, non-representative sample of stories in the ecosystem services world (broadly defined) from this year that promise to be important in 2014. Here they are - what are yours?
2013 was a year chock full of hotspots of ecosystem services projects and controversy - like the debates in the UK over the country's new habitat mitigation market - but among them, Louisiana stands out. Dubbed "the Himalayas of ecosystem services," there's been more than enough to report on there. There's the very beginnings of RESTORE Act implementation, for starters. The Act will take all the cash BP gets fined in its civil trial and put it towards comprehensive wetland restoration and sediment diversion projects across the Gulf. It's a windfall for the region, and state agencies and conservationists there want to spend the money wisely, knowing what they get for their investment. They've written a raft of plans on how to proceed, and ES feature prominently as the objects of concern and the measures ($ and otherwise) of success. We'll see more projects coming online in 2014 and begin to see their effectiveness.
Speaking of BP's ongoing civil trial, there've been lawsuits left and right in Louisiana this year that revolve around what's the best way to do coastal restoration and who's to blame for the mess of wetland loss. As arguments came to their final stage in BP's ongoing civil trial, the southeastern Louisiana levee board that was created after Katrina to deal with systemic wetland loss in the area drew on some arcane French-era law on levees to launch a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against oil/gas companies for the part their canals have played in destroying wetlands. That drew the outrage of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, who says, no, the Army Corps of Engineers and their levees on the Mississippi are to blame. Gov. Jindal had John Barry - the levee board member who advocated for the lawsuit - sacked while CPRA went ahead with its own lawsuit against the corps. The different lawsuits are not just indicative of differing opinions of who's to blame - the corps or the resource extraction industry - but of what's the best way to do restoration: fill in old oil/gas canals, or breach levees to divert sediment to form new land?
If billion dollar plans and lawsuits weren't enough, New Orleans was named one of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 resilient cities. NOLA will get a "Chief Resilience Officer" funded by Rockefeller and the city will also be the test site for some new software made by the same company that makes data mining tools for the CIA that will help the new CRO figure out what investments in resilience will be most likely to payoff.
In fact, this year we learned that about half of all federal spending that could be defined as related to ES is on tools for mapping, monitoring, and modelling ES. In the Gulf (and for several other places around the world), The Nature Conservancy and partners have put together a slick interactive tool that lets users visualize different investment options for restoration. ES monitoring is moving to automation at the same time that folks are figuring out how to build new maps and models. The Forest Service runs several experimental "smart forests" that collect lots of data on many different environmental indicators, and they (and many other resource agencies) are also (infamously) exploring the use of drone technology to manage forest fires. There's a growing number of tools for measuring and managing ES, and these tools have become fundamental to the ES paradigm (see a great special issue on them in the new journal Ecosystem Services here). Watch for new efforts at big data analysis and ES in the coming year.
2013 saw yet more institutions organizing business and government around seeing environmental degradation as a matter of nature's benefits not having an economic value. That's not to say these new fora and panels actually did anything about the very issues on which they pontificated. I'm thinking here about November's first World Forum on Natural Capital, which was essentially more a feel-good pep talk for corporate leaders and less a hashing out of actionable tasks. It didn't go uncontested and in 2014 we should expect to see the same sort of opposition that we've see for carbon as business leaders aim to price any and all other ES. In December, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services convened in Turkey to finalize their first work plan. It's been years in the making and we'll see in 2014 how it starts to get implemented.
The story that most fell under the radar this year was the White House's executive order on climate change adaptation and resilience. This year, about 30 federal agencies developed their first-ever set of plans for how they intend to respond to climate change in their operations and outreach. The EO goes a step further and calls on all agencies to revamp their programs to make it easier to fund projects that are meant to support resilience, for agencies like Interior to manage their lands for resilience, for agencies to develop data and tools for recognizing resilience, and for agencies to plan for climate change risk. All these have the potential to be driving significant work in the coming year and beyond.
The story that wasn't was the US Supreme Court's ruling that appears to constrain regulators' flexibility in determining appropriate compensation for wetland and stream impacts under the Clean Water Act. It's not yet clear whether it'll actually turn out to be problematic. Meanwhile, EPA and ACOE are finally getting around to clarifying what wetlands and streams are within their ambit, a move that environmentalists have long fought for in the legislative sphere. As the draft guidance currently stands, it could bring in millions of dollars more in compensation work yearly because it expands what counts as a water of the US.
The single best piece out there this year on ES was Paul Voosen's history of ES as told through Gretchen Daily, Peter Kareiva, and Michael Soule. He does a brillant job showing how even if it looks like it from 30,000 feet not every conservationist is on board with the project of valuing nature, and he ties this in with an on the ground look at ES "modelling sausage." If you haven't read it yet, go do it now. The runner-up is SciAm's recent piece characterizing the paradigms and debates in wetland restoration today, with a major focus on differing opinions on how to do work in the Gulf.
So what did I miss?
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Time to CHAT? Mapping "Regulatory Resistance" in the West
"Mining companies like to say, 'The gold is where the gold is, that's where we need to go,'" said Chet Van Dellen, GIS coordinator for Nevada's Department of Wildlife. "We like to say the animals are where the animals are." New high-tech maps detail wildlife habitat in West, Scott Sonner, 12/13/13Late last week a coalition of western governors released a new tool meant to help gold miners, transportation designers, energy companies - just about anybody with a natural resource impact - to plan development projects. CHAT, the Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool, going to be one big map for the West, and although it's not entirely filled out yet, the idea is to show those gold miners, hey, here's where our important habitats are. It pays to be clear: the maps are not, as the AP's headline suggests, simply mapping wildlife habitat in greater detail. The tool's resolution is somewhat impressive - down to the square mile - but what it's really doing is visualizing the spaces where project managers can expect to run into problems getting their permits. Some habitats will not be as crucial or as much of a priority as others. The difference may be subtle, but on it turns the role mapping plays in setting the public agenda in environmental governance today.
A CHAT map. From: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/the-big-picture-western-governors-unveiling-high-tech-satellite-wildlife/article_7b95cf0e-496e-51df-b324-2a5f929a2232.html
Where you'd expect some important habitats to cross-cut state boundaries, like in Yellowstone, we see that they cut off at Montana, either because the state hasn't gotten around to doing it's categorization yet or because that habitat simply isn't as important to Montana as it is to Wyoming. CHAT is meant to show all western states so that if you're a pipeliner you can see what sort of regulatory resistance you're going to run into across your entire project. Or if you're a gold miner, you can easily see whether it'll be easier to do a project in Utah or Arizona.
It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: federalism. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, much as they are doing with candidate species rulings. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like the northern spotted owl generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "Enlibra" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.
But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of heavy regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and even the Center for Biological Diversity like it, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status.
It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: federalism. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, much as they are doing with candidate species rulings. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like the northern spotted owl generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "Enlibra" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.
But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of heavy regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and even the Center for Biological Diversity like it, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status.
All the cards are on the table now in the West. It's not clear yet whether that's a good thing. It'll probably make regulators' lives easier, for one. There's also certainly a power in being the one to set the terms of engagement. Either way, maps like CHAT are going to play an important role in the making of the relationship between states, nature, and capital in the near term. Just take a look at the interactive maps the Coastal Resilience Network has set up that allows users to choose how important different economic and ecological variables are to determining great places to do restoration. It's not a regulatory map (yet), but you can imagine some of the opportunities that it would afford regulators. It'd make it easier for them to say, for instance, hey, we made the map based on how users (citizens?), not us, weighted restoration priorities. It's not our fault...Stay tuned for more.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Scaling up? Difficulties in the prioritization, selection, and evaluation of restoration sites for Oregon's ecosystem services market
I gave a talk today at the World Conference on Ecological Restoration here in Madison, WI. It's a take on how restoration sites in the Oregon wetland mitigation market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, and ends with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets. It's something I've addressed in other ways, to other audiences, here, here and here. Oh, and here and here, too! My argument in the talk is that efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets, though that's likely to differ from region to region. Below you can find the slides and text.
Scaling up? SER 2013 presentation - Eric Nost from ericnost
Thanks for coming. I’ll be sharing just a slice of some recent research which is part of a larger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking here in the US.
The message I hope yall can take home today is this: efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes in ensuring greater ecological returns from restoration may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets. Outcomes are likely to differ from region to region, however. PES promoters regularly call for spatially-explicit approaches to restoration, but on the ground their efforts run into resistance from the entrepreneurs at the heart of these markets. Their concerns are both economic and ecological.
I’ll make the argument by taking us through how restoration sites in the Oregon market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, ending with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets.
We’ll start here. Welcome to the HML restoration site in exurban PDX.
It’s one site in a regional market for aquatic ecosystem services, providing several. The wetland you see stores and delays water, for instance, mitigating flood impacts for downstream homes.
The stream, OTOH, provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range.
And so on January 25, 2012, the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) authorized the sale of mitigation credits representing this salmon habitat to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD). Now, it’s absolutely worth taking just a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how mitigation markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, in conjunction with state agencies like DSL - permit developers to compensate for unavoidable resource degradation by paying entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. At HML, DSL is the banker, but usually it is private industry.
DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself to THPRD. Instead, it sold credits - measures of both the quality and quantity of habitat created after the agency replaced a culvert and performed other restoration there.
THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed.
The idea is to ensure some kind/degree of equivalence between resource impact and resource restored, in order to accomplish a no net loss of function and acreage. This is the art and science of assessment.
HML is operated by DSL, but it is a testing grounds for the WP, TNC and other cons developing what they see as more rigorous assessment methods and protocols for Oregon’s market and beyond. HML embodies 3 big moves in market-based environmental governance. While it’d be nice to go through all of them, given the growing number of calls for watershed approaches to how sites are chosen and evaluated - here at the conference, for instance - I want to focus on this last point. We can chat later about any of them.
Indeed, mapping and modelling landscape interactions at existing and possible restoration sites is increasingly recognized as an important component of site evaluation. The idea is that a site like HML’s ES are spatially dependent, or contextual - relative to what’s going on up and down the watershed. Think of it like this: if you restore a wetland in the middle of nowhere and no one’s around to benefit from how it retains flood waters, does it provide an ES? For many, the answer is no.
The international think-tank for ecosystem services accounting, TEEB, for instance, note that the specific provision of services depends on the site. The work of the wetland at HML to store and delay water matters because there are homes in the 100 year floodplain downstream that benefit.
Cons bio and head of NCP, Gretchen Daily concurs. She calls for focusing on the right places in the landscape that leverage high ecological returns on investments.
HML’s position, for instance, allows it to slow down and cycle the increased runoff from logging, quarrying operations.
Such calls from conservationists have in fact made it into policy. In 2008, ACOE and EPA put out a new rulemaking formalizing many aspects of the mitigation market nationally. The rule called for states and regions to implement strategic approaches to restoration siting, rather than sites being chosen opportunistically, in reference to cost or availability or interest..
And to bring it back to DSL, the value of a wetland means its opportunity to provide an ecological function/service based on where it is.
So not only is landscape ecological assessment and prioritization on the minds of conservationists and of official interest to the feds, it’s central to DSL, and in the rules in OR. But it’s one thing to be on the books and another to be in force on the ground. The question is: how does restoration siting actually play out in OR?
There are three moments to it, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against those of private entrepreneurs. In the short-term, at least, entrepreneurs’ work is made difficult in 3 ways by regs and cons’ new metrics and approaches. In the rest of this talk I’ll walk us through these 3 moments and 3 difficulties to siting.
In the first moment, ecologically-trained consultants to bankers work in the office with several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration.
Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the HML. Consultants have to answer questions about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the assessment of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.
Whatever their score, bankers then have to take their numbers to the agencies and staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment, approving, modifying, or denying an entrepreneur’s choice of where to do restoration.
Agencies also categorize wetlands. Some kinds of wetlands in the landscape mosaic are more market-worthy than others. For instance, DSL has written farmed floodplain wetland sites off the map in a recent rule. Based on a series of reports on long-term success and failure, DSL doesn’t think they restore a lot of the storm water retention services that the wetlands in urban areas - where the majority of impacts are - provide. They didn’t meet watershed needs. In the rule, a farmed wetland is seen as not hydrologically degraded and so restoring it wouldn’t bring back hydrological functions. Bankers disagree on ecological grounds: these kinds of wetlands have been tilled, tiled, and plowed. They think those are precisely the sites that need to be restored in the landscape.
Now, when bankers finally do get their bank approved, they get credits to sell. What non-profit conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, the amount of credits they can sell would depend in large part on the location of their project.
These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC.
The idea is that if they were doing restoration in a priority area bankers would get the full amount of credits they normally would and receive less if they were not in a priority area. But potentially restorable properties in priority areas are on average slightly more expensive than elsewhere, and this could cut into bankers’ profits. Perhaps more crucially, it drastically cuts into their potential range of sites to choose from, when finding a site tends to be more luck than anything anyway. And bankers also wonder how priority areas were chosen, often noting that their sites have plenty to offer as important.
The point is that this sort of watershed plan, something called for in the 2008 federal rule, makes some places obviously more valuable than others to do restoration, and that’s a big shift. It may make the market more like any other traditional market, but now working outside a priority may not earn bankers as many credits as it would have. To be clear, this isn’t yet implemented, but it’s very much on the table because of the federal rule.
So we can start wrapping up. We can pull out 3 points of difficulty in the market:
1) The priorities aren’t necessarily what bankers see as priorities, and even the idea of prioritizing is limiting, at least right now, in comparison with current practice.
2 The categorization of wetlands in the landscape isn’t how bankers would address watershed needs..
3)They’re asked to account for offsite processes they have little control over
Because of all this, bankers are hesitant about starting new projects. No private entrepreneur has done a project with the new landscape focused metrics and rules yet.
But this isn’t simply because bankers don’t get the gospel of landscape ecology. Bankers’ considerations are both economic and ecological - it’s sometimes bad for business, sometimes not what they see as the right ecological priority. So how have regs and cons been able to put forth such a strong vision of their own in the first place? Markets around the country vary and a lot of discretion about which watershed plans to choose and metrics to use is left to regional, district, or state staff. In a place like OR, with strong institutional momentum behind planning/zoning, regulators are more willing to make and point at maps and say, do resto here. With better data collection and availability, they’re also just more able to. Regs and cons’ ability to come out with a strong plan very much reflects the Oregon context..
The conclusion to takeaway is that in spite of calls from TEEB, Gretchen Daily, and others, efforts on the ground to improve the assessment and consideration of watershed/landscape needs in restoration run into resistance when implemented in restoration markets. The causes stem from both differing economic and ecological viewpoints, but this resistance will differ from place to place. What’s implied is that in some places, there may be other approaches to addressing watershed needs within a compensatory mitigation framework that are more effective than relying on private entrepreneurs, who have economic and ecological hesitations. We don’t have to look any further than HML - DSL’s own bank - for an example, and similar approaches exist nationally. But that’s going to have to be the topic of another talk.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
A look at RESTORE Act implementation
What would you do if you had about a billion dollars for ecological restoration?
That's exactly what the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.
Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already taking a 5% toll on RESTORE Act funds] Well, this Council has a comprehensive plan. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their initial comprehensive plan that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions:
1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.
2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.
3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.
4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters.
5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.
6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a growing number of voluntary restoration projects in the works, not to mention talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.
7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see.
8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:
"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."
There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, or chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services.
9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're producing it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what kind of science is the Council interested in funding?
That's exactly what the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.
Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already taking a 5% toll on RESTORE Act funds] Well, this Council has a comprehensive plan. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their initial comprehensive plan that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions:
1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.
2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.
3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.
4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters.
5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.
6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a growing number of voluntary restoration projects in the works, not to mention talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.
7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see.
8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:
"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."
There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, or chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services.
9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're producing it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what kind of science is the Council interested in funding?
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Forever forever? What the heck does permanent mitigation mean?
In a recent op-ed for USA Today, mitigation banker Wayne Walker argues for establishing prairie chicken conservation banks, as a way to prevent the looming "train wreck" between environmentalist and oil/gas industry interests. It's a well-written piece that tries to spell out in basic terms, what mitigation is all about (EcosystemMarketplace renamed it, "How to explain mitigation to your grandmother"). Sometimes, though, it's deceptively simple. A big part of Walker's case is that offsets, like diamonds, are forever. He points to wetland and stream mitigation: "The logic of permanent easements is straightforward: Draining a wetland to build something is permanent -- not temporary -- and therefore the mitigation should also be permanent. The same principle holds true for the chicken. Impacts to it and its habitat are both permanent – the offset should be as well." Problem is, there's a clear difference between a permanent easement and a permanent offset, a difference Walker doesn't sort out. An easement is no guarantee of ecological function. Sure, the Corps will require an easement, but are they going to come back to the site in 50 years and check in to see what's up? To assess whether the wetland, stream, or prairie habitat is in a condition or performs such that it will account for the original impact the site offset? Maybe, but even if the Corps/USFWS did come around, would they require the bank to do anything about it? Should we even care? If the wetlands your local Wal-Mart paved over today are going to dry up or sink into the sea anyway in the next 20 years because of climate change, does it matter that the compensatory mitigation site Wal-Mart buys credits from function in the same way the wetlands currently do? I've walked through similar issues here and here. If, as Walker notes, the goal for all sides is "certainty," these are key questions if mitigation banking is to gain a sense of (ecological) legitimacy in an era of rapidly changing climates.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
New climate adaptation lawsuit in Louisiana
A flood protection agency in Southeast Louisiana is suing oil and gas companies including BP and Exxon Mobil for damages to wetlands caused by pipeline canals, and their case is making it above the fold of the NYT. Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East claims that the canals have altered hydrology in the area in such a way that has caused hurricane damage to increase and that, over time, will cause coastal lands to "slip into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of this century, if not sooner." Though they don't state it as such (itself interesting), the object in question in this case is ecosystem services: "BP and Exxon Mobil, you've destroyed the flood mitigation service these wetlands are supposed to provide to us, and we're going to hold you accountable for our loss" As cities and states attempt to preserve, design, and restore dunes, marshes, reefs, wetlands, etc. in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, SLFPAE's case will tell us more about the extent to which not just these habitats, but the climate-buffering services they provide will be treated by the courts (see Keith Hirokawa's work here and here for excellent first answers).
At first glance, a water agency in SE LA doesn't seem like the sort of entity to be bringing suit against some of the world's most powerful corporations. But they're pulling absolutely. no. punches. The gem of the case is here - to them, the oil/gas pipelines constitute a:
BOOM. So what are they asking for?
Um...It's hard not to think of a certain late 90s comedy here, making it difficult to take the agency's case seriously. From the starting gates, the flood protection agency is equivocating on the role of the federal government, namely the Army Corps of Engineers, and why that entity shouldn't be held liable as well for its part in reworking the bayou's hydrology.
At any rate, it seems the lawsuit's hooks are not in the Clean Water Act per se, but in common law: negligence, nuisance, and some archaic LA code dating back to French rule called "Servitude of Drain" requiring downstream landowners to provide means for conveying water off adjacent upstream properties. It's not spelled out for us how SLFPAE thinks it applies to this case, but I suppose the argument is that BP and Exxon Mobil have altered the area's hydrology in a way that downstream areas too effectively drain, indeed conveying stormwaters onto higher ground than before.
Bringing it back: we can probably think of this as perhaps the US's second major climate adaptation lawsuit - NYT explicitly makes the link to the first: Kivalina, the Alaskan community that sued Exxon Mobil for the effects of climate-caused sea level rise on their village. The court there said that Kivalina's case was more a political question than a justiciable one. We'll see how SLFPAE's case pans out, but hopefully it'll regain some ground, as common law applications to the environment become increasingly tenuous, from Kivalina to Wisconsin.
At first glance, a water agency in SE LA doesn't seem like the sort of entity to be bringing suit against some of the world's most powerful corporations. But they're pulling absolutely. no. punches. The gem of the case is here - to them, the oil/gas pipelines constitute a:
“mercilessly efficient, continuously expanding system of ecological destruction”
BOOM. So what are they asking for?
"many billions of dollars. Many, many billions of dollars.”
Um...It's hard not to think of a certain late 90s comedy here, making it difficult to take the agency's case seriously. From the starting gates, the flood protection agency is equivocating on the role of the federal government, namely the Army Corps of Engineers, and why that entity shouldn't be held liable as well for its part in reworking the bayou's hydrology.
At any rate, it seems the lawsuit's hooks are not in the Clean Water Act per se, but in common law: negligence, nuisance, and some archaic LA code dating back to French rule called "Servitude of Drain" requiring downstream landowners to provide means for conveying water off adjacent upstream properties. It's not spelled out for us how SLFPAE thinks it applies to this case, but I suppose the argument is that BP and Exxon Mobil have altered the area's hydrology in a way that downstream areas too effectively drain, indeed conveying stormwaters onto higher ground than before.
Bringing it back: we can probably think of this as perhaps the US's second major climate adaptation lawsuit - NYT explicitly makes the link to the first: Kivalina, the Alaskan community that sued Exxon Mobil for the effects of climate-caused sea level rise on their village. The court there said that Kivalina's case was more a political question than a justiciable one. We'll see how SLFPAE's case pans out, but hopefully it'll regain some ground, as common law applications to the environment become increasingly tenuous, from Kivalina to Wisconsin.
Thesis
I've been working for the past couple of years at the University of Kentucky on my master's thesis. Building from a bigger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking, my research has argued that market planning and design for wetland and stream ecosystem services in Oregon has not been as easy a task as some pundits might think it, nor has it as of yet been as devastating as others might imagine it. The thesis is available here:
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/9/
I'll be moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to carry on with the Ph.D. I look forward to keep exploring and communicating how market environmental law and policy is (not) equipped to account for climate change and its effects on ecosystem services.
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/9/
I'll be moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to carry on with the Ph.D. I look forward to keep exploring and communicating how market environmental law and policy is (not) equipped to account for climate change and its effects on ecosystem services.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)