Addressing the Environmental Impacts of Large Infrastructure Projects: Making 'Mitigation' Matter

摘要

The unprecedented attention that DOI has devoted to landscape-scale management and planning has improved the siting process for major energy and other infrastructure projects. DOI's new landscape-scale approaches also hold the promise of applying project-related mitigation obligations more sensibly, and efficiently, to important regional conservation needs. Now, with the attention of the White House on developing cross-agency mitigation approaches that tie into advanced regional planning, there is a unique opportunity to work across all permitting agencies and to address mitigation obligations in a holistic way. It is the classic definition of a "win-win": developers reap the benefit of expedited infrastructure permitting processes while, at the same time, their compensatory mitigation dollars are invested wisely and effectively in a consolidated manner, on regionally significant landscapes, in accordance with sound planning.