Timely measures: Mitigation policy for multiple use and sustained yield

The word ‘mitigation’ often carries a sense of diminishing or restraining something considered harsh or severe. In contrast, the BLM’s policy on mitigation is a forward-looking dimension of the agency’s ability to authorize public land uses while protecting resources and ensuring that projects have long-term benefits. It enhances the BLM’s flexibility in managing public lands for multiple use and sustained yield.

The policy presents a consistent set of principles and procedures for incorporating mitigation into BLM decisions, which for project proponents also means greater predictability and an opportunity to become partners in resource management.

For decades, the BLM has used avoidance and minimization to mitigate adverse effects to public land resources. Since the early 2000s, the BLM has also used compensation measures, or compensatory mitigation, at the project level to address resource impacts that are exceedingly difficult or impossible to avoid or minimize. Lessons learned from these experiences and earlier policies inform today’s approach. 

Mitigation aims to balance the responsibilities of conserving natural and cultural resources for the future with the benefits of use and development in the present. It requires a comprehensive, strategic approach often called the mitigation hierarchy:

• identify impacts from proposed uses;
• avoid impacts where possible;
• minimize impacts that are unavoidable; and
• finally, determine appropriate compensation for residual impacts that remain.
   

Considering mitigation well in advance of making decisions about individual proposed uses is key. Land use plans identify resources in particular areas that are especially important, scarce or sensitive, or which have protected status under a legal authority such as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act or a state law.

Identifying opportunities for mitigation and incorporating the standards that will be used to evaluate effectiveness into approved resource management plans can achieve long-term benefits at the landscape scale. The remaining steps in the sequence are then taken as part of the project-level environmental review that precedes a decision on authorizing a particular proposed use or action.
 

When requiring a project sponsor to accomplish mitigation as a condition of authorization, the BLM identifies the impacts related to particular mitigation measures and explains how the measures avoid, minimize or compensate for those impacts. All mitigation should have measurable, durable effects that can be adaptively managed as needed to meet resource objectives.