Permitting horticultural peat operations in Minnesota, USA, new and emerging issues

摘要

Within the USA only about half of the original 89.5 million hectares of wetlands existing at the time of European settlement remain today. Because of these substantial wetland losses and growing public awareness of wetland values, state and federal governments in the early 1990s adopted a "no net loss" of wetlands policy. The state of Minnesota enacted its own Wetland Conservation Act in 1991 to address this issue. This policy requires compensation or mitigation for unavoidable wetland impacts such as peat mining. As a result increasingly strict regulations have made it much more difficult to acquire the permits required to mine peat. In the past decade several new horticultural peat operations and expansions of existing operations have occurred in the state of Minnesota. These operations are subject to new state and federal permit requirements for various aspects of peat mining. Environmental review is also required for some peat mining developments depending on the size ofthe operation and the potential for adverse environmental effects. As regulations continue to evolve some of the new and emerging issues include water quality, in-kind restoration, temporal mitigation, financial assurance, and hydrologic monitoring. The trend is towards more peat mining regulations in the future.