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"No Net loss" is the United States government's overall policy goal regarding wetlands preservation. The goal of the policy is to balance wetland loss due to economic development with wetlands reclamation, mitigation, and restorations efforts, so that the total acreage of wetlands in the country does not decrease, but remains constant or increases.
"No net loss" is defined by the International Finance Corporation as "the point at which the project-related impacts on biodiversity are balanced by measures taken to avoid and minimize the project's impacts, to understand on site restoration and finally to offset significant residual impacts, if any, on an appropriate geographic scale (e.g local, landscape-level, national, regional)."
It supported off-site wetland mitigation in which a permittee purchases mitigation credits from a third-party mitigation bank. This entity, private, governmental, or non-governmental, promotes the no-net-loss policy by restoring or creating an area of wetland into a mitigation bank and selling compensatory mitigation credits to permittees.
In the United States, compensatory mitigation is a commonly used form of environmental mitigation and, for some projects, it is legally required under the Clean Water Act 1972. Compensatory mitigation is defined by the US Department of Agriculture as "measures to restore, create, enhance, and preserve wetlands to offset unavoidable adverse ...
Conservation banking is derived from wetland mitigation banks that were created in the early 1990s. Through Federal agency efforts, mitigation banks were created to focus on preserving wetlands, streams, and other aquatic habitats or resources and offered compensatory mitigation credits to offset unavoidable effects on the habitats or resources ...
Biodiversity banks and the credits that are generated from them rely on regulations and legal frameworks. When establishing a biodiversity bank, a legal arrangement, such as a conservation easement (also known as a conservation covenant) might be required to set aside the land for conservation and prevent the use of the land for development, either in perpetuity or for a specified time period ...
The mitigation hierarchy is commonly applied to EIAs to guide the mitigation of negative impacts on biodiversity. [83] The mitigation hierarchy is a framework of sequential steps (avoid, reduce/minimise, restore/rehabilitate, and offset) and biodiversity offsetting is its final step to counterbalance impacts that cannot be avoided or reduced. [84]
Mitigating for habitat loss requires either the replacement or protection of habitat within the HCP area or at another location. This may be accomplished through a variety of methods including: Acquiring existing habitat; Employing conservation easements to protect existing habitat; Improving or restoring degraded habitat;