Defenders' Experts
Buying, Selling and Trading Biodiversity in Washington: A Bazaar for Biodiversity
Buying, Selling and Trading Biodiversity in Washington
Preface
by Sara VickermanThe State of Washington is one of the few in the nation with an official policy acknowledging the importance of biodiversity conservation. The governor appointed a Washington Biodiversity Council in 2004 to develop a long term conservation strategy for the state. The council hadn't gotten far with its deliberations before it began to focus on the need to address biodiversity conservation on private lands.
Defenders of Wildlife has long recognized that although public land supports many important habitats and species, many more depend entirely or partly on private land. And while land acquisition, regulations and government incentive programs are important tools, new approaches are needed in order to accomplish the enormous task of conserving the nation's biodiversity before it is lost to development and other threats.
In preparation for a major conference on landowner incentives, sponsored by the Washington Biodiversity Council in January of 2007, Defenders offered to write a background paper outlining some policy options. We were fortunate to have Bartholomew (Mac) Martin as a summer "resident" completing the requirements for his Masters Degree in natural resource policy at Portland State University. Together, we decided that some of the most novel and promising approaches to conservation are emerging as part of a new generation of market-based tools like conservation banking. Though challenging to implement, these tools have the potential to re-direct existing mitigation programs toward more integrated and ecologically significant projects while providing new and profitable opportunities for private landowners to sell "ecosystem services" to developers.
This report provides extensive background information on these market-based strategies and methodically outlines the opportunities and challenges they present. After sifting through many policy options to facilitate the implementation of market-based conservation strategies, Mac recommends the creation of special districts for biodiversity markets, using ecoregional boundaries.
Time will tell whether this approach or other some other institutional arrangement will best expedite biodiversity conservation in Washington or elsewhere. Regardless of the outcome, we believe the information in this report will be useful to policy makers and others who want to tap new revenue sources for conservation and engage private landowners in a positive way.
Next. . .
How can the public's need to preserve and restore vital natural resources occur while still respecting the historically-established property rights of private citizens? One answer involves a public policy that uses principles of commerce to the arena of natural resource conservation.
