Solid Ground: Using Mitigation to Achieve Greater Predictability, Faster Project Approval, and Better Conservation Outcomes

摘要

A wind developer seeking to build turbines on private lands that will affect the federally listed Indiana bat and bald eagles; a landowner building a new beach house on sand dunes where the listed Alabama beach mouse lives; a natural gas company seeking to develop a new pipeline across both federal and private lands. In all of these cases, mitigation-shorthand for avoiding impacts to important species and habitat, minimizing impacts, and then providing offsets for the remaining, residual impacts-is a valuable tool for developers and federal agencies to comply with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a variety of federal statutes that regulate impacts to important wildlife species and habitat, and/or public land management statutes requiring that uses of public lands are balanced with protection and conservation.1