The US government has released guidelines to assist public agencies in assessing how their projects, policies, and regulations impact ecosystem services, in a move poised to reshape decision-making at a national level.
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published the finalised document on Wednesday, following public consultation launched in August.
The guidance aims to provide agencies with an understanding of how federal rules can affect communities through impacts on forests, wetlands, rivers, and other ecosystems.
It outlines a step-by-step approach to including these impacts in benefit-cost analyses – including placing a dollar value on ecosystem services.
“Considering ecosystem services … in benefit-cost analyses will help agencies understand relevant trade-offs or complementarities among different ecosystem services,” said the guidelines. US public agencies must conduct benefit-cost analyses of projects and regulations to determine their efficiency and value to society.
“It will also help agencies avoid situations in which certain ecosystem services are implicitly given no weight or disproportionate weight in an analysis.”
The government proposed seven main steps:
- Determining the scope of the analysis
- Developing a baseline
- Outlining alternative regulatory approaches
- Assessing benefits and costs
- Evaluating distributional effects
- Treating uncertainty
- Presenting results and accounting statement
WEIGHING THE ALTERNATIVES
Under the guidelines, planners should consider the potential impact of a project or regulation on both the areas that generate ecosystem services, and the sites where the communities that benefit from those services are based.
Public agencies are encouraged to take a long-term approach to investigating the impacts of changes in ecosystem services.
Benefits and costs of regulation should be measured against a no-action baseline, which must be determined through considering a number of variables, such as demographic fluctuations.
In addition to the proposed initial regulation, agencies must include at least two alternative approaches to the policy in their analysis.
Notably, the document emphasised the critical role of nature-based solutions, following on from a roadmap published last year by the US government to advance their implementation.
“These kinds of alternatives may achieve the same regulatory objectives at lower cost, or with greater durability or resilience, or provide additional benefits at little to no additional cost,” said the guidelines.
When assessing benefits and costs, the analysis should focus on ecosystem services poised to have a “meaningful” impact on communities, alter existing inequalities, or lead to irreversible damage.
“Effects should be – in order of preference – monetised, quantified, or described,” the guidelines said, encouraging agencies to put a dollar value on ecosystem services.
The US government released a plan for placing monetary values on the nation’s natural assets in January 2023, but the initiative has not progressed much since then.
OVERBURDENED
The guidelines also encouraged public agencies to engage with Indigenous Peoples to understand whether a project or regulation affects them.
Planners should pay close attention to localised effects, including health or other impacts on overburdened communities, it said.
“For example, hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants and animals can be important means for obtaining locally sourced foods – which can be especially important for populations that include subsistence hunters or gatherers – and can also have important cultural value.”
A study published in Nature, by researchers at the Vermont-based Gund Institute for Environment, found that changes in ecosystem service in the US disproportionately affect non-white, lower-income populations.
“This is largely driven by the conversion of forests and wetlands to cropland and urban land cover,” the study said, calling for targeted land use policy interventions to curb inequalities.
By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com
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