WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2015 - The White
House released a memorandum Tuesday on the ways President Obama’s administration
will encourage the private sector to mitigate the impacts of development on
natural resources and public lands.
“We all have a moral obligation to the
next generation to leave America's natural resources in better condition than
when we inherited them,” the president said in the six-page memo. It was addressed to
the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and the Departments of Defense, Interior, and
Agriculture.
“As efforts across the country have
demonstrated, it is possible to achieve strong environmental outcomes while
encouraging development and providing services to the American people,” the
memo continued. “This occurs through policies that direct the planning
necessary to address harmful impacts on natural resources by avoiding and
minimizing impacts, then compensating for impacts that do occur.”
The memo stipulated that the agencies
adopt a “clear and consistent approach” that minimizes or avoids impacts to
natural resources in “their activities and the projects they approve.” USDA has
180 days to submit its plan, while the other agencies have one year.
The departments were encouraged to
institute “advance compensation” policies to create a market-based system for
controlling environmental degradation. Wetland mitigation banking,
for instance, has been widely used to maintain a “no net loss” of wetlands
since the 1990s. According to the policy, private companies proposing to
destroy or degrade wetlands in the process of developing land must “bank”
wetland credits, either by paying to restore an existing wetland, or by
building new wetlands.
Each department was also instructed to
set measurable performance goals that could be used for implementation and
evaluation on an interagency basis.
In an email to Agri-Pulse, Don Parish, senior director for regulatory relations
with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the memo is “a direct attack on
private property rights and will further depress our struggling economy.”
Fred Krupp, president of the
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), released a statement praising the White
House’s move, calling it “another addition to the powerful environmental legacy
that President Obama will leave.”
“The White House is setting a new
precedent that human needs for food, fuel and fiber must not come at the expense
of the environment,” Krupp said. “Today is the first time in our nation’s
history that a president has gone so far as to call for ‘no net loss’ for all
natural resources, and to institute a preference for ‘net benefit’ where
possible.”
Eric Holst, the associate vice
president of EDF’s working lands, said in a separate release that Obama’s new
mitigation strategy should open the door to a whole slew of new environmental
markets for agriculture, giving farmers and ranchers the opportunity to earn
new revenue for conservation activities.”
“If conservation isn’t already a part
of their business models, it certainly can be now,” he said.
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