The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today announced its revised Mitigation Policy and Endangered Species Act Compensatory Mitigation Policy.
The revised Mitigation Policy, which updates the original policy created in 1981, establishes fundamental principles and a framework for applying a landscape approach to achieve no net loss of resources and their values, services, and functions resulting from proposed actions.
The revised ESA Compensatory Mitigation Policy adopts the Mitigation Policy’s principles, establishes compensatory mitigation standards, and provides guidance for the application of compensatory mitigation through ESA implementation.
FWS noted that the revised policies do not include a mitigation planning goal of net conservation gain, and that the policies clarify that the mitigation planning goal is to maintain the current states of affected resources and that mitigation recommendations and requirement should focus on important, scarce, or sensitive resources and be consistent with applicable statutory authorities and the responsibilities of action proponents.
FWS added that the policies also include “nexus and proportionality” as a fundamental mitigation principle to reinforce that appropriate mitigation measures must have a clear connection with the anticipated effects of the action and be commensurate with the scale and nature of those effects.
