69th SWCS International Annual Conference “Making Waves in Conservation: Our Life on Land and Its Impact on Water” July 27-30, 2014 Lombard, IL

1. Andrew Manale
APM Assoc./EPA retired

2.  Decline in federal funding
 Climate Change
 Population Growth and Increased Pressure to
Produce More with Existing Resources
→Drivers of change in the context in
which conservation must function

3.  Too few agricultural acres are adequately
treated—many legacy problems
 Stressed soil resources
 Nutrient enrichment
 Declining biological diversity and wildlife
habitat
 Poorly functioning wetlands
 Insufficient storage of flood runoff

4. → Nothing new. Well documented
 Inefficient Management of Soil/land Resources from Society’s
Perspective. In other words,
 Overproduce those ecosystem services that respond to
distorted market prices distorted by government policy
◦ Commodity crops
◦ Geographically concentrated production of livestock
 Underproduce ecosystem services that reflect public goods
◦ Wildlife habitat
◦ Nutrient recycling
◦ Temporary water storage for flood mitigation
◦ Carbon and nitrogen storage in soils

5. Traditional interventions not enough
 Voluntary “walk-in” measures have not
worked
 Greater federal support not likely in near term
 Federal regulation not likely

7.  2002 Farm Bill
 Big question—how much money do we need?
 The result was CEAP—the Conservation
Effects Assessment Project
 What works?
 What needs to be done?
 How much is needed?

8.  Single practice approach vs by multiple practices and
systems approach
 Longer term maintenance
 Entire cropping system and land/practice interface is
important for services,
◦ ie. What is grown where is as important as how it is grown
 Tracking system for what and where
 Need more $

9.  “Problemshed” problems need problemshed
management
 Institutional governance driven by
problemshed institutional needs

10.  SWCS has made the case for a new paradigm
 Recently published Federal Principles and Standards for
Federal Investments in Water Resources states it in policy
terms:
 The distillation of the messages is this:
◦ Systems approach vs traditional single field/farm interventions,
◦ Elucidation of potential trajectories and their tradeoffs and
consequences
◦ Adaptive Management—treat interventions as management
experiments for which feedback is necessary
◦ Accountability—each level of decision-making knows what it is
responsible for and provides timely evidence of performance

11.  Fragmented governance
 NEPA implementation only as good as
interagency commitment
 USDA’s Office of Environmental Markets lacks
regulatory or oversight
→ A top down approach makes good
political sense, not necessarily
economic or scientific

12. ◦ Let prices lead to better allocation—i.e. ringmaster
◦
◦ Key is to establish prices for ecosystem services
that are not traditionally traded in private markets
Prices help bring
demand in sync
with supply

13.  Requires markets or contractual
arrangements for ecosystem service
◦ Many services are unquantified or unmonetizable
◦ Must be buyer and seller
 Many ongoing attempts to overcome these
problems
◦ Limited success to date
◦ ⇨ What can make a difference now?

14.  Tracking/accounting system for changes—more than a commodity
market exchange
◦ Attempt at creating system in 2009 farm bill under auspices of Office of
Environmental Markets, not yet borne out
 Clear or reasonable definition of what is traded and standards for
trades—necessary to improve the quality of the trade to ensure that the
public benefits, not just participants in trades—Richard Sandor and
wheat commodity futures markets, ie. Role of government to bless tool
for measuring what it is that is traded
 Clarity, from a legal perspective, on property rights—not so simple in
current world where most agricultural land is absentee owned
 These problems are ongoing and will take time to resolve. Very complex problems
 More potential money is involved, ie change hands, the quicker the resolution of these
issues

15.  Valuation generally requires assessments at significant
spatial scale that may involve multiple land owners and
operators.
 Uncertainty regarding larger framework conditions and
what others are doing that could affect success.
 Market (variation in prices) and policy uncertainty
 Uncertainty regarding measurement tools spatially and
temporally/accounting/longer term compliance with
contracts—surety bonds
 Uncertainty regarding transfer rights of credit or service
and what happens if nonperformance
 Uncertainty regarding what are accepted practices and
tools of measurement --How do we know we have a real
credit? Need for government blessing. Example from
wheat futures market.

16.  A new Farm Bill
 WRDA and new standards for all federal
investments in water resources/flood and
drought risk mitigation
◦⇒ Opens up new sources of money and
leveraging possibilities

17.  Consolidated easement programs
◦ More flexibility
◦ Greater focus on targeting and restoring
functionality of ecosystems
◦ Emphasis on multiple producers
 Regional conservation partnerships
◦ Regional and watershed
◦ $100 million seed money
 Flood Mitigation new focus focus.

18.  Under WRDA, federal government funds water
resource projects
 New Principles and Standards
◦ Governs guidelines on decision- making regarding
investments
◦ Apply to all federal agencies with investments in
water resources, incl EPA, USDA, BLM, Corps, etc.

19.  Healthy and resilient ecosystems
 Sustainable economic development
 Avoiding unwise use of floodplains
 Public safety, including recognition that nonstructural
approaches should be considered along with
structural approaches
 Environmental justice which means an active effort to
identify where an action could disproportionately
affect on disadvantaged populations and to engage
their input from the start
 Watershed approach that requires a
broader examination of both causes and solutions to
water resource issues, including cumulative effects of
past actions

20.  Makes project planning more consistent with planning and evaluation under the National Environmental
Protection Act (NEPA) and brings objectives more in line with intent of NEPA, that is the restoring and protecting
of Ecosystems
 Establishes that the evaluative framework be an ecosystem services approach to capture all effects
◦ ECONOMIC ENVIROMental and social
◦ It explicitly calls for consideration of nonquantifiable and nonmonetizable effects in overall calculus
 Best available science
 Emphasis on collaboration among federal and other
agencies
 Acknowledges risk and uncertainty, especially with climate change and injects Adaptive Management into the
design of the response to risk and uncertainty
 Water use and reuse, recognizing that the issue of water quantity includes its reuse and recycling
 Nonstructural approaches become equal partners
with structural approaches
 International concerns
 Design of alternatives that considers the legal or policy intervention that may lead to the problem to be
addressed
 Transparency in decisionmaking
 Plan selection—the benefits compared to costs must justify action. Final decision should
take into account the relative importance of both monetizable and
nonmonetizable effects

21.  Draft Guidelines reflecting new P&S await final
release
 Current Guidelines in place since 1983

22.  Coordination or stacking of pots of money
 Use of federal funds to leverage these pots
for focused efforts
 New efforts to allow prices to allocate
resources
◦→ These new policies lead
to new opportunities to
address challenges

23. Production Agriculture
Agricultural Conservation
The Invisible Hand of Prices
We Thank
You

24. The End