PCSD Recommendations on Natural Resource Stewardship
COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES
ECOSYSTEM INTEGRITY
INCENTIVES FOR STEWARDSHIP
AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES
ACHIEVEMENT OF YEAR 2000 SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT GOAL
RESTORATION OF FISHERIES
NATURAL RESOURCES
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 1
COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES
Use voluntary, multi-stakeholder, collaborative approaches to protect, restore, and monitor natural resources and to resolve natural resources conflicts.
ACTION 1. The President should issue an executive order directing federal agencies under the Government Performance and Results Act to promote voluntary, multi-stakeholder, collaborative approaches toward managing and restoring natural resources. [7]
ACTION 2. Governors can issue similar directives to encourage state agencies to participate in and promote voluntary, multi-stakeholder, collaborative approaches.
ACTION 3. Public and private leaders (within the constraints of antitrust concerns), community institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and individual citizens can take collective responsibility for practicing environmental stewardship through voluntary, multi-stakeholder, collaborative approaches.
ACTION 4. The federal government should play a more active role in building consensus on difficult issues and identifying actions that would allow stakeholders to work together toward common goals. Both Congress and the executive branch should evaluate the extent to which the Federal Advisory Committee Act poses a barrier to successful multi-stakeholder processes, and they should amend regulations to help accomplish this. [8]
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 2
ECOSYSTEM INTEGRITY
Enhance, restore, and sustain the health, productivity, and biodiversity of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems through cooperative efforts to use the best ecological, social, and economic information to manage natural resources.
ACTION 1. Federal and state agencies should identify and address areas in which interagency cooperation is needed for sustaining ecosystems, natural resources productivity, and biodiversity; and they should allocate funds to ensure successful cooperation. Since many agencies operate under laws passed decades ago, they should help revise policy frameworks to address the needs of maintaining ecosystem processes and the resources that depend on them.
ACTION 2. Conservation groups, private landowners, and local governments should identify actions and conditions that will advance their objectives and so are most important for their participation in ecosystem approaches to natural resources management.
ACTION 3. Government agencies at all levels should help cooperative local efforts use ecosystem approaches to natural resources management by providing access to information, technical assistance, and funding and by removing policy and administrative obstacles to successful ecosystem approaches.
ACTION 4. Federal and state agencies, in collaboration with localities, should develop indicators which can be used to monitor the status of ecosystems and natural resources productivity. They should encourage consensus goals and shared responsibilities for restoring damaged ecosystems.
ACTION 5. Government agencies, conservation groups, and the private sector should expand the use of ecosystem approaches by using collaborative partnerships, developing compatible information databases, and carrying out appropriate incentives for responsible stewardship.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 3
INCENTIVES FOR STEWARDSHIP
Create and promote incentives to stimulate and support the appropriate involvement of corporations, property owners, resource users, and government at all levels in the individual and collective pursuit of stewardship of natural resources.
ACTION 1. Commercial users of public resources should pa the full cost associated with the depletion or use of those resources - reflecting both market and nonmarket values. For example, decisions on providing access for timber and grazing uses should take into account not only financial costs but net impacts on ecological systems (positive as well as negative), including effects on water quality and biological diversity.
ACTION 2. Federal, state, local, and tribal officials, in making decisions on public infrastructure projects, should weigh the economic benefits of the project against the full costs - incorporating both market and nonmarket costs, such as the net impacts on the ecological system. Existing projects should be reengineered to the extent possible to restore ecological functions and habitat using cost-benefit analyses, including both market and nonmarket values.
ACTION 3. Legislative bodies at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels should extend tax credits and deductions to promote actions taken by property owners to enhance the long-term conservation value of their property beyond compliance with existing regulations.
ACTION 4. Landowners who take conservation action beyond compliance with regulations, such as establishing habitat for endangered species, should not face penalties for returning to the regulated standard.
ACTION 5. State, local, and tribal governments should identify habitats of particular ecological concern and establish impact fees or mitigation requirements to shift effects to regions of lower concern.
ACTION 6. State and federal governments should establish, through general taxes or user fees on public resources, a trust fund to be used in purchasing particularly ecologically sensitive or valuable habitats.
ACTION 7. The federal government should develop a matching fund program to encourage federal, state, local, and tribal investment in sustainable programs and projects.
ACTION 8. The federal government should establish a revolving fund to enable local communities to undertake the planning required to develop incentive-based resource conservation programs.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 4
AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES
Manage and protect agricultural resources to maintain and enhance long-term productivity, profitability, human health, and environmental quality.
ACTION 1. Government at all levels should seek to reduce the compounding and threatening effects of urban sprawl on prime farmland. States and localities can identify and take strategic measures to protect their prime farmland, including such policies as easements, zoning, taxation, financial incentives, and transportation.
ACTION 2. Government should clarify and revise policies and programs in potential conflict with each other and with the objectives of sustainable agriculture and should closely coordinate and consolidate related programs. For example, this could include consolidating certain conservation programs under the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Natural Resources Conservation Service, integrating USDA technical and financial resources with natural resources objectives, and strengthening soil and wetlands conservation programs.
ACTION 3. Agricultural producers can broadly implement integrated farming systems (whole-farm and whole-ranch planning) to ensure that agricultural activities maintain and enhance natural resources; protect human health and environmental quality, including the quality of water, air, and soil; and protect and enhance wildlife populations, habitat, and diversity.
ACTION 4. Partnerships involving USDA agencies, other federal and state agencies, conservation districts, private agricultural consultants, environmental organizations, commodity groups, and other interested organizations and individuals should be strengthened to implement natural resource, agricultural conservation, and water quality programs.
ACTION 5. The federal government should increase investment in sustainable agricultural research, technical support, and demonstrations of conservation techniques and sustainable farming systems.
ACTION 6. The federal government should continue to move toward market pricing for the use of public natural resources, including timber, water, oil and gas, minerals, and grazing, recognizing that there may be circumstances in which subsidies are warranted for the public good.
ACTION 7. The federal government should increase flexibility in farm commodity programs and improve access to capital to encourage farmers to respond to market signals, improve crop rotations, and diversify the mix of agricultural goods produced to enhance profitability and environmental quality.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 5
ACHIEVEMENT OF YEAR 2000 SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT GOAL
Establish a structured process involving a representative group of stakeholders to facilitate public and private efforts to define and achieve sustainable management of forests by the year 2000.
ACTION 1. The President should direct USDA, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and other relevant agencies to build upon, support, and promote ongoing efforts to achieve sustainable forest management. These efforts should address such areas as national and international initiatives, terms of reference, criteria for defining sustainable forest management and indicators to measure progress toward their achievement, and use of resulting information in policy formulation. The agencies should explore various means for accomplishing this; the Seventh American Forest Congress offers one important avenue.POLICY RECOMMENDATION 6
RESTORATION OF FISHERIES
Restore habitat and eliminate overfishing to rebuild and sustain depleted wild stocks of fish in U.S. waters.
ACTION 1. The U.S. Department of Commerce - in conjunction with the National Marine Fisheries Service; the Regional Fisheries Management Councils; and other relevant federal agencies, state fisheries management agencies, and tribes - should develop fishery management plans that remove the human causes of fish population decline, including the elimination or mitigation of habitat degradation activities and incentives that encourage such activity.
These plans should adopt the precautionary principle in decision-making that in the face of scientific uncertainty, err on the side of resource conservation. These plans should address reduction in capitalization; improvement in the precision of science used for decision-making; quantitative assessments of social and economic effects associated with specific fisheries; public and private mitigating actions; reductions of bycatch, or sea life incidental to the catch of targeted species; improved cooperation and coordination among fisheries and land management agencies, private industry, hydropower agencies, and other stakeholders; and better programs to prevent accidental introduction of exotic species.
ACTION 2. The federal government, working with regional councils, states, and other stakeholders, should establish an allocation system for threatened U.S. fisheries as a possible fishing management tool. The system would set a limit on the number of fishermen eligible to work in threatened fisheries. In these cases, the stakeholders could explore a trading program that would enable fishermen to buy and sell the limited fishing rights. This action would create a cost-effective program for limiting fishing and thereby reduce pressure on endangered fish stocks. In determining whether to adopt a system of trading fishing rights, the economic impact on the industry must be considered.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 7
NATURAL RESOURCES
Develop federal, state, and tribal natural resources and biodiversity inventories, assessments, and databases; and by developing and using compatible standards, methods, and protocols.
ACTION 1. Federal and state natural resources agencies should convene planning sessions among all stakeholders to agree on data and information uses, standards, and methodologies for collecting data and conducting assessments of the nation's biodiversity and natural resources stocks, and the formats for reporting such data and information.
ACTION 2. Federal and state natural resources agencies and private institutions can intensify efforts to collect inventory data, involving contractors, volunteers, and others in the process, and applying agreed-upon collection and reporting standards and methodologies.
ACTION 3. Federal and state natural resources agencies should establish accessible and useful data repositories.
ACTION 4. All those involved in collecting and reporting natural resources inventories can coordinate to develop indicators of sustainability and indices showing the status of efforts to achieve the sustainable use of resources.
ACTION 5. Natural resources managers can monitor their management practices on a voluntary basis. Independent third-party verification of biodiversity assessments and sustainable practices may also prove valuable.
ACTION 6. The federal government should support data collection and analysis efforts for migrating species that breed in the United States but winter in other countries.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 8
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION
Create voluntary partnerships among private landowners at the local and regional levels to foster environmentally responsible management and protection of biological diversity, with government agencies providing incentives, support, and information.
ACTION 1. The federal government should provide incentive grants to landowners who act to protect and manage habitat for native species.
ACTION 2. Federal, state, and local tax laws, including estate and inheritance tax laws, should encourage private landowners to protect biodiversity by managing lands for conservation, improving degraded habitat, or donating land into protected status.
ACTION 3. State, regional, and local authorities can provide incentives to private landowners by targeting the use of bonds to finance the purchase, or protection through easements, of lands with significant natural value that are most threatened by incompatible uses. These funds should be used to capitalize trusts for protected areas, quasi-governmental conservancies, or other land funds wherever possible.
ACTION 4. State and local land trusts and conservancies can develop covenants among cooperating owners to maintain the long-term health and integrity of ecosystems. State and local land trusts and conservancies can enlist the cooperation of landowners in sustainable management patterns.
ACTION 5. Voluntary regional or watershed landowner councils can be formed to promote information sharing and cooperation.
ACTION 6. The federal government should recognize and encourage these efforts by creating partnerships with nonprofit organizations.