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Mitigation Malaise
Just a few months after a damning report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the national goal of no net loss of wetlands is not being met, the Army Corps has released a regulatory guidance letter with new standards for wetland mitigation that has environmentalists churning with anger. Although the letter was supposed to address some of the concerns in the NAS report, it instead "lowers the bar" on mitigation standards, according to Robin Mann with the Sierra Club’s National Wetlands Working Group.
According to Mann, the Corps’ new guidelines would allow vegetated buffers, uplands and wetlands preservation to count as mitigation when a wetland is destroyed. "This is backing away from no net loss," says Mann. "I have no argument with preserving wetlands, but to substitute preservation for mitigation is not acceptable." Neither does an upland or a vegetated buffer zone equal a wetland, says Mann. The guidance letter also weakens protection for streams, stating that 50-foot buffers are sufficient—rather than the 100-feet minimum many scientists argue is needed. "All of the science says we need wider streamside buffers, for floodplain functions, nutrient uptake, etc." says Mann. "Instead, the Corps seems to be taking an ‘anything goes’ approach here."
Not only do environmentalists and some regulators feel that the guidance letter weakens already weak protection standards for wetlands, they are concerned that, as the NAS study pointed out, wetlands mitigation is not even working. Says Mann, "You can dig a hole somewhere and fill it with water and call it a wetland. But that doesn’t mean it has the functions, habitat value, or even groundwater recharge value the natural wetland did."
The Corps claims that it requires 1.8 acres of new wetlands (on average) to be created for every one acre of wetland destroyed, which would suggest that wetland acreage is actually increasing. But the NAS report concluded that the Corps’ data was inadequate to allow it to determine whether mitigation projects the Corps had permitted had even been performed—or were successful. Other criticisms in the report were that the Corps does not design effective wetlands replacement plans, does not ensure that those plans are followed and has no method for making sure the created wetlands are permanent. The NAS researchers also found that the Corps does not track mitigation projects sufficiently or keep any record of the wetland functions that were lost when a wetland was filled. The one site researchers were able to visit in Southern California was a complete failure, an artificial wetland that had dried out when a PVC pipe filled with dirt and failed to deliver any water.
While not defending the Corps’ guidance letter—or its lack of data—the S.F. Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Andree Breaux says she can sympathize with its lack of personnel and funding to monitor mitigation projects. She says the Board has the same problem. "Wetlands mitigation can work, but it’s the big projects that people are more likely to keep an eye on. It’s harder to know if the smaller ones are working."
Breaux says the Board has detailed data on 110 projects that were put in the ground between 1988 and 1995, but that the projects desperately need follow-up in the field. "We need to go out and look at those projects and come up with a consistent way of monitoring them," she says. Breaux doesn’t reject out of hand the idea of buffer zones as compensation for wetland loss, but says each site should be evaluated independently. A vegetated buffer could have more ecological value than simply creating another little pond in an area surrounded by large industrial buildings, for example, she says. However, Breaux agrees that caution is necessary when it comes to mitigation. "We need to be very careful about uplands, buffers and out-of-kind compensation."
Contact: Robin Mann (610)527-4598 or Andree Breaux (510)622-2324
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