The Fish and Wildlife Service is moving ahead with a new program that
would allow federal agencies to offset the effects to endangered
species on public lands through conservation efforts on non-federal
lands, as long as there is a net benefit to the species.
While many conservationists are watching this development with
interest, some believe it is just another example of government
shifting its responsibilities to the private sector.
The program, called "recovery crediting," was first announced
by President Bush last month as a conservation tool to provide
incentives for private landowners to conserve endangered species and
act as environmental stewards of the nation's natural resources
(Greenwire, Oct. 22).
"Conservation success resides in nurturing a nation of citizen
stewards," said Deputy Secretary of the Interior Lynn Scarlett in a
statement. "The recovery crediting system creates incentives for
federal agencies to join with local communities to conserve federally
protected species and give them a helping hand on the road to
recovery."
Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act requires federal
agencies to conserve threatened and endangered species and ensure that
their actions do not jeopardize listed species or harm critical
habitat.
The recovery crediting system works by creating a "bank" of
credits that federal agencies can accrue through conservation actions
on non-federal lands. The agencies can store these conservation credits
for use at a later time to offset the effects of their actions on
federal lands.
Credits must be used to benefit the same species for which they were accrued.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will review each recovery
crediting system to ensure the net conservation benefit outweighs any
potential impacts that could occur through the project's
implementation.
Fort Hood model
The program is modeled on a pilot program developed at Fort
Hood in Texas involving FWS, the Defense Department, Texas State
Department of Agriculture and other agencies. Under the pilot program,
the U.S. Army has funded habitat conservation and restoration projects
on more than 7,000 acres of private land surrounding the military base
to benefit the endangered golden-cheeked warbler. Fort Hood is home to
the largest known population of golden-cheeked warblers in its breeding
range.
Steve Manning, president of the Texas Watershed Management
Foundation, a nonprofit group that is administering the pilot project,
said the three-year pilot project is about halfway complete. The groups
have finished the first phase of the project -- developing a process
for the Army to acquire credits from private landowners -- and are now
working on the "debit" side, figuring out how these credits can be
spent at Fort Hood.
The system works by assigning landowners a credit value based
on the amount and quality of habitat on their land. Landowners then bid
against each other for funding provided by Fort Hood, much as they
would to participate in the Agriculture Department's Conservation
Reserve Program. The lowest bidder with the best project wins.
Environmental Defense biologist David Wolfe said the system
works much like an insurance policy for Fort Hood. By investing money
in private lands, the Army accrues credits in a "bank," which it can
later use. For example, instead of having to stop training exercises
and consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service after a wildfire
temporarily degrades habitat on the base for the warbler, the Army can
use some of the credits from its bank, Wolfe said.
Manning, a fifth generation rancher in central Texas who
grazes cattle on Fort Hood, said the program has proved to be a
win-win-win situation. "There's an obvious benefit to the Army in
gaining greater training flexibility and operational certainty through
the use of the credits, and there's a benefit to the landowners
involved by providing an additional revenue stream when they're paid to
manage endangered species. Then, there's a third benefit to endangered
species, which have more habitat being managed and protected," he said.
John Herron, director of conservation for the Texas chapter of
the Nature Conservancy, said the pilot program at Fort Hood provides a
good model that could be replicated nationwide. "I think it's great to
try to provide this incentive for conserving endangered species" on
non-federal lands, he said.
Even so, Herron said there is much to be worked out. For
example, he said, the agencies need to figure out how to treat the data
in a way that protects the confidentiality of private landowners while
ensuring that the system's progress can be monitored.
Restricted info
Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological
Diversity, said that one of the major problems with the Fort Hood
program is that public knowledge and oversight of the program is very
restricted. "The public is not permitted to know which landowners are
participating, what land is involved, what management is taking place,
and when monitoring occurs, the public is not permitted to see the
monitoring reports," he said.
These limitations make the program "a fantastic giveaway of
federal dollars to private landowners with absolutely no accountability
at all," Suckling said. It probably also makes the program illegal
because there is no way of verifying whether it meets the "best
science" test established by the Endangered Species Act, he said.
But Wolfe said there is some level of public oversight of the
program. For example, he noted that the monitoring reports expected to
be published in the next few years will be publicly available as part
of the scientific literature. Additionally, the staff of the Fish and
Wildlife Service, which the public has entrusted to manage wildlife,
will get to see all the information coming out of the program, except
the names of the landowners involved and the exact location of the
ranches.
Suckling characterizes the Fort Hood pilot program as a "net
harm" program that has been a disaster for the golden-cheeked warbler,
noting that the program was established so the Army could receive
permission to kill half of the endangered species on its property,
amounting to the single largest take permit in the history of the
Endangered Species Act.
Suckling worries about the implications of instituting such a
program on a broader scale, and he questions why the federal government
is setting up a system to allow the destruction of critical habitat on
public lands.
"Now, we're going to reduce the formerly high standards of
public lands and attempt to purposely shift the species onto private
lands, where we have very little control over what happens to them,"
Suckling said. "That's a disastrous policy."
But Wolfe said the program and others like it could be a model
for future conservation efforts. The program is unique because it
provides incentives for private landowners and looks at the entire
range of a species, he said. "The scale and potential scope are at a
level that could have a profound impact on the recovery of species,"
Wolfe said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comments on its draft guidance on the recovery crediting system until Dec. 3.
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