Report from the Field

A reading of the popular press would suggest that it is impossible to find common ground between economics and the environment, and between business and conservation communities. Conventional wisdom holds that environmental legislation like the Endangered Species Act is down for the count because industry and landowners are united in their hostility toward the law. But that same press offers poll after poll showing consistent voter sentiment for environmental regulations in general, and strong support for the Endangered Species Act in particular. These contrasting messages may indicate that a solution reconciling human endeavors and the conservation of species will be found not at the margins of the debate, but at some point well within the extremes.

In southern California, one of the strongholds of Congress' anti-environmental wing, calls for the dismantling of the Endangered Species Act may not have been quelled, but they seem to have been tempered. Landowner pleas for more timely, cost effective, and consistent implementation of the Act have resulted in a novel application of its existing provisions. Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP), a state-federal cooperative response exercised under section 4(d) of the Act, promises to provide relief to landowners and to improve long-term protection of species. This program may just be the common ground from which the next generation of Endangered Species Act-inspired conservation planning programs will emerge.

California Governor Pete Wilson sponsored the Natural Community Conservation Planning Act of 1991 as part of his Resourceful California program, which was designed in significant part to resolve tension surrounding the conflict between increased demand for new housing and infrastructure on the one hand, and state and federal mandates to protect habitat for endangered and threatened species on the other. Natural Community Conservation Planning functions as a regional, habitat-based conservation program. In its application in southern California, federal and state wildlife agencies, local governments, conservation interests, and developers work collaboratively to produce individual subregional plans that consider extensive landscape areas, the ecosystems that they support, and their resident species. By establishing managed habitat reserve systems under NCCP, lands are freed for development or resource extraction elsewhere. Perhaps the most important economic benefit of NCCP is its potential to eliminate the uncertainties associated with land-use planning that often accompany federal or state listing of species. Comprehensive planning for natural ecological communities both expands the breadth of conservation activities and provides a mechanism for the "one stop" regulatory permitting that development interests have long sought.

The NCCP pilot program encompasses more than 6,000 square miles in five southern California counties. Orange and San Diego Counties are the furthest along in their planning processes. The Orange County program focuses conservation efforts on the coastal sage scrub community, which provides habitat for the threatened and federally protected California gnatcatcher, and a host of other plants and animals that currently are candidates for state or federal protection. Because coastal sage scrub exists in a mosaic of habitats that include native and non-native grasslands, chaparral, oak woodlands, and riparian communities, the proposed NCCP reserve system in Orange County includes a broad scope of plant communities and the animals that inhabit them. Unique in its private land planning approach, NCCP has been hailed by the Secretary of the Interior as a national model for avoiding the "environmental and economic trainwrecks" typified by the spotted owl conflict in the Pacific Northwest, and experienced across the nation in the last decade.

The findings presented here emerged from a discussion of lessons learned from the NCCP program in central and coastal Orange County, where the first subregional plan is nearly finalized. Key observations from this planning experience seem highly applicable to Endangered Species Act implementation elsewhere. The discussion group was comprised of federal and state regulators, development interests, environmentalists, local government, consultants, and scientists. The goal of the discussion was to identify specific experiences from NCCP that can be readily exported to other conservation programs on private lands in an effort to introduce more regulatory certainty and a greater range of protection into implementation of the Act. It should be noted that one feature of the program -- application of a simple model to assess empirically the relative value of habitats for purposes of interim land-use decision-making -- was viewed by some participants as flawed; although all believed that such a model is a necessary component of this and like programs. The following eight findings that participants considered central to the program's success thus far and in the future emerged from the discussion:

1. State and local government benefited from the comprehensive habitat-based planning offered by NCCP. Impacts from the listing of endangered and threatened species have been felt across the country and by a broad array of industries. Increasingly, critics of the Act suggest that state and local government be given the option to solve their own endangered species problems in a comprehensive fashion. Southern California's NCCP focused on an imperiled natural biological community within a mosaic of habitats across an extensive geographic area. By addressing the natural community in its landscape matrix, multiple habitats and species are afforded protection before they become further threatened by development in the region. This "pre-listing" strategy seems likely to reduce the need for future species listings. Comprehensive conservation planning that spotlights both listed and unlisted species is now a feature of federal endangered species policy.

2. Provision for regulatory coverage of multiple species in the planning area was essential to keep development interests at the table. The extent of regulatory coverage resulting from conservation planning has been a significant issue for landowners in Orange County. Long-term land-use planning becomes extraordinarily difficult when the number of species covered by a conservation plan is fewer than the total number of species at risk in the region and property owners face the prospect of further species listings. Where comprehensive planning has been conducted in a specific habitat type, regulatory coverage should encompass the species that historically occurred in the planning area. NCCP provides for generalized conservation coverage of the coastal sage scrub ecosystem by using a limited number of "target" species as surrogates for other species inhabiting the same geographic area. Permit coverage should also be provided for species that have not historically been found in a particular habitat type, but may infrequently take residence in the planning area. Regulatory "take" of such species can be permitted as long as the impact of that take is specifically addressed in the planning.

3. Funding provided by the state of California and the U.S. Department of the Interior to assist in financing comprehensive habitat-based planning was essential. Although conservation planning has been financed by a mix of public and private sources in Orange County, many landowners feel they have been asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the financial burden. Local government is reluctant or unwilling to invest in what they perceive to be an unfunded federal mandate. This frustration is compounded by federal funding priorities that appropriate more than half of available monies to fewer than two dozen species, many of which are largely resident on the public lands. By consolidating endangered species efforts into a single regional planning exercise, NCCP offers an attractive buy. With more than 50 percent of federally listed species occurring exclusively on private lands, NCCP-type programs should become high priorities for federal funding.

4. A "target" species approach made multiple species conservation planning goals achievable. Species listings often focus on the rarity of organisms. While rarity is generally well-correlated with vulnerability, it can be a poor indicator of the ecological role of a species or its importance to comprehensive conservation planning. Programs should target species whose successful conservation would confer an umbrella of protection to numerous other organisms within the same habitats, reducing the need to list additional species at later planning stages. NCCP concentrated on three target species -- the California gnatcatcher, coastal cactus wren, and orange-throated whiptail lizard -- which served as surrogates for a host of other plants and animals, including more than two dozen candidate vertebrate species and scores of rare plants in the coastal sage scrub ecosystem.

5. Establishing an interim take mechanism to provide an incentive for landowner participation was absolutely essential to launching the NCCP program. The practical effect of the section 9 prohibition against habitat modification is to place limits on land-use, creating indirect moratoria on economic activities during the period when permits for take are being sought. To mitigate some of the effects of this limitation on economic activities, the NCCP provided Orange County landowners with a mechanism that allowed for limited interim take. The interim take mechanism used in NCCP placed a five percent cap on conversion of habitats on public and private lands both occupied and unoccupied by listed species. This interim mechanism provides a release valve for critical economic activities in advance of long-term conservation plans. It also provides a viable short-term alternative to individual Endangered Species Act section 10(a) permits and section 7 consultations.

6. Delegating interim take permitting to local and regional planning agencies based on state and federal guidelines is strongly desired by program participants. While local government in Orange County traditionally has been the primary agent responsible for land-use planning, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is the only agency with authority to issue permits for incidental take under section 10(a) of the Act. Such permits can have a profound effect on local land-use activities. In cases where there is an approved NCCP or equivalent conservation process underway, and where participating local government has the resources and desire to make decisions relating to interim take, it should be given the authority to do so when directed by clear guidelines and appropriately monitored by the wildlife agencies. The lesson learned from NCCP is that if the Service retains veto authority for individual projects, applicants will go directly to the agency for approval of interim take. Giving local government the responsibility for approving interim take would shift the day-to-day burden of permit approval from the Service. This would allow the agency to focus on the big picture of conservation planning and management. The Service and/or state should retain veto authority over the whole interim program. This veto authority would be triggered by violations of explicit standards.

7. Providing clear guidance in the form of NCCP Conservation Guidelines was useful. A common complaint of Orange County landowners and planners is that historically there has been no certainty and little specific direction concerning the activities prohibited under section 9 of the Act. To guide their planning, local and regional agencies should be offered bright-line standards consistent with long-term conservation objectives. A multidisciplinary scientific panel was convened under NCCP to develop generalized conservation guidelines adaptable to local circumstances. Founded on some basic spatial principles -- that reserves optimally should be large and interconnected, and should avoid internal fragmentation -- these guidelines included a habitat evaluation model to help planners assess the value of land for future conservation planning. While the model generally helped planners shift development from areas of high conservation value, some participants have criticized the standards as difficult to apply because of a lack of empirical data and the model's sensitivity to changes in assumptions.

8. Participating landowners need assurances that unanticipated costs associated with future listings will not be borne by them. Orange County landowners who are engaged in expensive, time-consuming planning exercises associated with NCCP want assurances that, upon completion and approval of plans, they will not be subjected to further mitigation costs generated by future listings, unforeseen circumstances, or new biological information in the area covered by the plan. Any significant modification to those plans or new planning activities in the same region initiated by public agencies should be fully funded by those agencies.

Whether Natural Community Conservation Planning fulfills the expectations of the Secretary of the Interior as a national model for private lands conservation planning will only be realized over time. Orange County's central and coastal plan must be enacted, management initiated, and the impact of future land development on the remaining coastal sage scrub community observed over the long term before the program can be fully evaluated. But today, with the Endangered Species Act facing fierce challenges from property rights activists, the need for responsive programs that offer greater landowner certainty cannot be overstated. Because NCCP offers that and the multiple species, multiple habitat protection that environmental interests seek, it may have the potential to provide a real solution to one of our most intractable environmental and economic conflicts. As always, the devil is in the details; with that in mind Natural Community Conservation Planning deserves the most critical of evaluations in the months and years to come.

Lynn Dwyer and Dennis Murphy are at the Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. Steve Johnson and Mike O'Connell are at The Nature Conservancy, 201 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. A Pew Scholars Award in Conservation and Environment to Dennis Murphy was used to underwrite the Natural Community Conservation Planning Workshop

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