Conservation and Regulation Working Together

Increasingly it is becoming more and more difficult to reconcile conflicts between development activities and environmental conservation and stewardship. Conservation planning and program integration techniques can be employed to help navigate paths through these conflicts and achieve more efficient and effective outcomes for all involved. IPaC Associates employs these techniques to facilitate mutual understanding and acceptance among the participants and to work constructively with the parties to create and achieve common goals that allows for development within the context of environmental conservation and stewardship.

Landscape Planning

Programmatic Consultations (ESA Section 7)

IPaC Associates is a regulatory conservation consulting company guided by the principle that successful conservation requires creative solutions integrating the social, conservation, and legal needs of each individual situation. In today’s complex conservation climate successful resolution to environmental conflicts often requires the forging of partnerships between the private, public, and conservation communities. Through constructive dialog and the sharing of information IPaC Associates works to build understanding among and between these different communities in an effort to find common ground upon which creative solutions can be developed. Our goal is to work towards solutions in which all parties feel that their needs have been met; in today’s world, we can no longer afford to have winners and losers, but rather, we must figure out ways to move forward together as one integrated and hopefully successful society.

General Conservation Plans (ESA Section 10)

General conservation plans (GCPs) are large landscape habitat conservation plans (HCPs) developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to streamline ESA Section 10 permitting processes while achieving better conservation results through the integration of multiple unrelated projects. Ideally these plans are developed jointly with local communities to ensure that their conservation programs will be accepted by those who will employ it. Often these plans can achieve greater levels of streamlining through integration with local regulatory process to reduce redundancies.

Program Integration

One of the most effective methods of addressing potential conflicts between proposed projects and species conservation is through the integration of the processes used to design the projects and those used to evaluate and ultimately approve them. Without program integration these processes are typically implemented sequentially with the proposed project being designed in isolation then handed off to regulators who complete their own independent review using their program standards. Through the process of program integration, the design standards employed by project proponents can be aligned with the standards of the approving agency’s review program to ensure that potential conflicts are avoided early in the project design process when the maximum flexibility exists. To complete such integration efforts IPaC Associates works with the involved parties to “deconstruct” their processes into individual steps, aligning the procedures employed within each, and developing step-by-step guidance for each participate. In this way each participant knows what is expected of them, how to accomplish it, and how their work will be received by the other involved parties.

Conservation Planning & Program Integration

Conservation Frameworks are short documents (generally 5 to 15 pages) that employ a structured analysis process to identify and document species’ conservation needs, threats to those needs, and goals and objects for address those threats. These documents illustrate causal linkages among environmental stressors produced by various activities and the resources used by species. The identified goals and objectives can be used to guide the design of development projects, best management practices, restoration activities, conservation projects, and more. Implementation of the conservation framework process can lay the foundation for the landscape-level perspective needed to implement development and restoration efforts in a more coordinated and focused manner to better support resource conservation. IPaC Associates has a long history of experience in this arena.

Contact Us
(703) 801-5303
mhorton@ipacassociates.com