The Hope of Habitat Banking

• Author: Michael J. Bean/Jessica Wilkinson
• Position: Directs the Wildlife Program at Environmental Defense Fund; he worked in the Environmental Law Institute's program in the 1970s/directs the Institute's Wetlands and State Biodiversity Programs
• Pages: 32-35

Page 32 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, July/August 2009

State leaders are expanding their vision

beyond traditional game species and

highly endangered species to include

wildlife species and natural places

that may become endangered with-

out targeted conservation ef‌forts.

Federal legislation and funding have

provided the impetus for this new approach, requiring

each state to develop a State Wildlife Action Plan. As of

today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved

plans from all 50 states and six territories.

Habitat banking in its various forms has the poten-

tial to help reach the ambitious, broad goals of these

state plans. In general terms, banking is the practice

of restoring, creating, or preserving wetlands or species

habitat and saving the acreage to of‌fset impacts from

future development projects. Habitat bankers — which

may be public agencies or private entities, depending

on the project or location — assess, select, and manage

the bank sites. Each site has a value measured in credits,

based on a formula that factors in the size and qual-

ity of the restored or created habitat. When developers

need to of‌fset or mitigate their impacts on wildlife or

habitat, they can go to a habitat banker to purchase the

required number of credits, prices for which are set by

market transactions.

Banking is just one of several powerful conservation

tools — including land acquisition, conservation ease-

ments, economic incentives, and regulation — that

states will need to employ to help protect at-risk wild-

life, the ultimate goal of all State Wildlife Action Plans.

But how can states put habitat banking to its best use

in conserving priority species and habitats identif‌ied in

the new plans?

Case Study: e Face of the Future

Development and land use practices invariably

impact the environment, yet only a small fraction of

those impacts are of‌fset by legally required compensa-

tory activities under the Clean Water Act or Endan-

gered Species Act. By adopting new federal and state

provisions that require compensation for impacts to

signif‌icant but unprotected species or habitat types,

public agencies can more ef‌fectively seek to of‌fset en-

vironmental damage that currently goes unaddressed.

Across the country, new compensatory programs have

been emerging that ref‌lect the public’s concern over the

loss of wildlife habitat.

In Wyoming, for example, growing concern over

the fragmentation of sagebrush habitat due to energy

development led Governor Dave Freudenthal to cre-

e Hope of

Habitat Banking

A tool to help fulf‌ill the promise

of state wildlife action plans

Michael J. Bean

Jessica Wilkinson

Michael J. Bean dire ct s th e W ild li fe P ro -

gram at Environmental Defense Fund;

he worked in th e Envir onmental Law

Institute’s program in the 1970s. Jessi-

ca Wilkinson

dir ect s the

In st it ute ’s

W et l a nd s

and State Biodi versity Prog rams. Re-

printe d from www.wil dlifejournals .org

with permissio n.

re s e a rc h & Po l i c y sT u d i e s