White House to agencies: Tally projects’ financial damage to ecosystems

Photo: Richard Revesz, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, testifies on Capitol Hill last year. Francis Chung/POLITICO

Federal agencies would be required to do a full accounting of how their decisions affect ecosystems the public depends on under a draft guidance that the White House will release Tuesday.

The Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy guidance targets the benefits people derive from forests, wetlands and waterways.

While ecosystems have sometimes appeared in the cost-benefit assessments that agencies must write to support their rules, policies and projects, there has never been a governmentwide directive or guidance for doing that accounting.

We must measure what we value, not just value what is simple to measure.

Revesz and Prabhakar

As a result, ecosystem values are treated as secondary to more easily quantified benefits, Richard Revesz, administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar wrote in a joint blog post Tuesday.

“Failing to fully account for nature’s bounty has led to undervaluing and erosion of our nation’s natural assets,” they wrote.

The draft guidance is part of a larger Biden administration push to update the government’s decades-old regulatory schemes.

First floated in April, the administration’s plans for a regulatory overhaul focus on how agencies tally the costs and benefits of a broad swath of actions — from setting environmental standards and leasing decisions to procurement and construction.

The draft guidance being released Tuesday will undergo a period of public comment and peer review after it is published Tuesday on the Federal Register website. The White House’s goal is to finalize it within a year.

The draft focuses on the nature’s values for human health and the economy. Trees are a salable crop, but also offer shade, climate benefits and wildlife habitat. Wetlands protect against property damage from flooding. New York City owes its high-quality drinking water to the Catskill and Delaware watersheds.

Non-economic benefits are also considered, such as environmental impacts on physical and mental health and recreation. If an ecosystem underpins a Native American tribe’s religious practice, for example, that’s also an ecosystem service.

The guidance sets best practices for agencies to ensure that these social goods are given equal footing with other costs and benefits during regulatory review.

“We must measure what we value, not just value what is simple to measure,” Revesz and Prabhakar wrote.

The draft guidance directs agencies to broaden the scope of their analyses to fully account for ecosystem services. It requests a clear description of the link between the proposed action and any changes to the ecosystem that could harm or benefit humans.

Where possible, agencies are asked to assign a dollar value to

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Full article: www.eenews.net