Corps respond to wetlands critics

Standards for wetlands mitigation projects have been strengthened in new guidance issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on November 1. But environmentalists are still not satisfied with the revisions, saying they do little to support the Corps “no net loss” of wetlands policy.

The guidance responds to criticisms in a June report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) indicating that wetlands created to replace those destroyed by development activities too often fail and do not restore the ecosystem functions of the lost wetlands (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2001, 35 (17), 367A).

The guidance requires developers to draft mitigation plans before damaging wetlands and establishes success criteria, such as survival times for new plantings and minimum soil moisture levels, for new and restored wetlands. It requires the Corps to establish a system developers must use to gauge the adverse ecological effects that their projects have on wetlands, and to monitor the success of new and restored wetlands.

But the guidance fails to address one of the top criticisms in the NAS report: the Corps’ over-reliance on mitigation instead of avoiding wetlands loss in the first place, charges Tim Eder, with the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental group. The Corps is supposed to place the highest priority on suggesting alternatives to draining and filling wetlands when it issues permits, such as building on the dry instead of the wet part of a development site, the NAS panel suggests. But agency officials often skip over that step and go straight to recommending mitigation actions, the NAS panel wrote.

In documents explaining the new guidance, the Corps insists it is adhering to the steps outlined in the wetlands permit process to decide whether wetlands loss is unavoidable. The documents support the Corps’ belief that the agency has addressed all the NAS recommendations concerning improvement of wetlands mitigation projects. “The Guidance Letter does not affect the Corps’ process for evaluating permit applications or change the avoidance and minimization steps in that process,” the Corps responds on its Web site: http://www.usace.army.mil/inet/functions/cw/hot_topics. —JANET PELLEY