Wetland Replication: “But it’s just as good as the one I broke.”
Posted by - Bruce Winn : Category - WetlandsEveryone agrees that wetlands are valuable, and most people agree that we should take all reasonable steps to preserve our remaining wetlands. But sometimes, a wetland seems to be in just the wrong place; right in the path of a proposed development project. Often in this type of situation, “wetland replication” or “wetland mitigation” is proposed as the solution. This is an interesting concept that we can actually watch work (or not) right here in our own backyard.
The Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act and the federal Clean Water Act both prohibit filling in or otherwise destroying wetlands; sort of. If a proposed project will harm a wetland, the regulatory agencies may require the applicant to enhance, restore, or create wetlands to compensate for the damage. Often this mitigation takes the form of a “replication area.” The developer or landowner creates a new wetland at least equal in size to the wetland being destroyed.
This seems very reasonable at face value. If you destroy one wetland but create another, there is no net change; no harm done so to speak. But according to a recent report of the General Accounting Office, 80% of these replications fail. In these cases, the original wetland is destroyed, and the wetland that was to replace it is either never produced or dies a quick death. A private study by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) found “…numerous sites where mitigation efforts failed, never got done, or were later destroyed.” The Environmental Law Institute found that “Issuance of a permit with mitigation requirements does not guarentee, however, that the required mitigation is achieved – or even attempted.”
The reasons for failure of replication sites fall into two broad categories: administrative and ecological. On the administrative side, we have attended Pittsfield “Conservation” Commission hearings at which commissioners were told that replication wasn’t working and that a fix would not be feasible. The Commission dropped the requirement for replication. After all, we can’t ask someone to do something that would be difficult. A recent study of replication sites in Massachusetts reported that in 21.9% of the cases in the study, the reason for failure was that no attempt to build the wetland was ever made. On paper, the applicants were undertaking wetland replication, when in fact they were not. Numerous studies report that very seldom do regulatory agencies check up on developers to ensure that the work specified in the permit is actually being done.
According to the Environmental Law Institute, another problem is that the determination of success or failure is made by the very people who are performing the work. We have seen this a number of times in Pittsfield as responsibility for the monitoring and reporting of progress was given to the project’s developer. And to add insult to injury, we’ve seen a case in which taxpayers were given the bill for the time the developer spent monitoring their own project, even though problems caused by the developer necessitated the monitoring. In one case, an important parameter in the monitoring protocol was rainfall measurement. Very good data came in from the developer, despite the fact that, as BEAT pointed out at the time, the rain guage at the site was broken and could not hold water.
The point is that what’s written on the permit is meaningless without independent monitoring and enforcement. A study of 84 replicated wetlands in Massachusetts found that although the replication areas had equal plant cover and equal general plant health as the original wetland, the new wetlands did not support the amphibians, birds, and mammals that were supported by the original wetland. There was a general decrease in the number of species present. Interestingly, this discrepency was not evident at 7 sites in the study that were getting close scrutiny due to their high-profile status. The sites that were monitored more closely than the others had a higher success rate.
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