The Time it Takes for Restoration 2024 Update

The 2008 Final Rule on Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources (herein 2008 Rule) provides an approval process for mitigation bank instruments (MBIs). The 2008 Rule stipulated that the regulator’s side of the approval process (mandatory federal processing) take no more than 225 days. A previous quantitative analysis was published in 2023 based on 500 mitigation banks approved from 2014-2021 (Martin and Madsen, 2023). This 2024 update includes data from an additional 160 banks approved from 2022-2023, and an analysis of mitigation bank credit release timelines based on a dataset of 608 records.