Procurement structures are evolving so that contracting is increasingly treating restoration products as tradeable goods—that can be purchased on delivery—rather than services. Data innovations driven by satellite-based information and machine learning capacity offer new abilities to efficiently model, predict, estimate and measure environmental outcomes. Policy innovations at the state level are moving toward a goods-focused restoration economy, while maturing federal programs have maintained some national momentum even despite recent federal attacks on mitigation markets.

Review processes for restoration are as, or more, extensive and time consuming than those for development projects. A wetland or stream mitigation bank takes an average of three years to approve while many impact permits take 60 days. Restoration projects burn through a third of their funding on permitting. We need funding for Nature, not paperwork. The impediments to restoration must be eliminated in order to allow more frequent, larger, and rapidly approved restoration and green infrastructure.

Habitat fragmentation reduces the diversity and resilience of our nation’s fish & wildlife species. Our Western Restoration Program supports habitat connectivity by providing technical assistance, connecting partners, and integrating best practices to ensure more widespread, effective, and equitable connectivity projects. DOT’s National Culvert Removal, Replacement & Restoration Program, also known as the Culvert Aquatic Organism Passage (AOP) Program, allocated a billion dollars for projects reconnecting habitat that has been divided by barriers from transportation corridors, dams, diversions, and weirs. We are committed to providing direct technical assistance to tribes and underserved communities to access this once-in-a-generation funding.

Market-based policies depend on efficient (cheap) quantification tools and policy that creates sufficient certainty (i.e., acceptable risk) for investors. These conditions are lacking in many areas of state policy as well as in major areas of federal policy that would otherwise have the conditions to support market-based approaches. We will seek to change this by supporting state-based policy development and efforts to replicate effective initiatives. The State of Maryland is the first to consider a Comprehensive Conservation Finance Policy that makes clear how the state can be a purchaser of conservation outcomes. More states adopting policies like this will open the door to large-scale or sustained investment by government in the private delivery of public restoration and green infrastructure needs.

We have a concerted focus on identifying ways federal and tribal policies can better support tribes’ opportunity to lead ecological restoration projects--and have those projects serve as economic assets by making sure they can be used as offsets under federal programs like wetland mitigation banking.

We believe that tribes should take advantage of the economic development benefits of mitigation banking while structuring the development of the bank to serve tribal sovereignty and promote natural resource mitigation.

Traditional environmental efforts have often pursued conservation targets above social outcomes, but new approaches that allow payment to be tied to any outcome that can be quantified has the potential to deliver environmental justice, local employment and other benefits. Efforts to streamline environmental review have the potential to increase the quality of public engagement through improving timely access to meaningful information and interactive tools and technology.

Policies that set ‘net zero’ objectives and stick to key mitigation principles can drive $USD billions more in investment in offsetting environmental impacts.

We believe government can find, nurture, and learn from new tools that help keep pace with technology and break away from the status quo of slow regulatory change. We have evaluated an approach called a “regulatory sandbox”—a flexible testing ground for new innovations—and applying that to conservation, for faster conservation and restoration outcomes.