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Abstract: Compensatory mitigation (also known as offsetting) is the practice of allowing harm to one ecosystem as long as a comparable ecosystem elsewhere is restored. This common practice is intended to balance the competing demands of economic development and environmental protection. Here, I explore compensatory mitigation through a focus on one particular type: stream mitigation banking in the United States under the Clean Water Act, a market‐based form of environmental management. I explain the motivations for compensating for rather than preventing environmental damage more broadly, the practice of stream mitigation banking, and what we know about its environmental and social impacts. I conclude by calling out the stakes in offsetting more generally, and in stream mitigation banking in particular, arguing that neither market‐based environmental management nor offsetting more generally may be serving us well. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Value of Water Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studying rivers, physical and social science researchers tend to analyze water resource regulation at a national scale, treating “the state” as a monolithic entity mechanistically executing its regulatory code. Yet variation abounds in the interpretation and application of any national environmental policy. This study examines the complex geography of a small but crucial component of the U.S. Clean Water Act—compensatory stream mitigation—and how particular states and federal agency districts, and the individuals occupying key roles in those units of government, have interpreted the same national law in quite different social and environmental settings. The appearance of monotonic regulatory outcomes at a relatively coarse scale obscures a high degree of fine-scale heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]