As usual the webi­nar is part of the BBOP com­mu­nity of prac­tice (all pre­vi­ous webi­nars are archived there if you want to lis­ten to them later).

When and how does the BBOP webi­nar take place?

Some infor­ma­tion on the BBOP webinar

Wetlands are increas­ingly being rec­og­nized for the eco­log­i­cal goods and ser­vices that they pro­vide to soci­ety, which range from drought and flood pro­tec­tion, to cli­mate reg­u­la­tion and bio­di­ver­sity main­te­nance. Recently found aware­ness of the social and eco­log­i­cal value of wet­lands calls for greater soci­o­log­i­cal atten­tion to the decision-making processes that per­mit wet­land alter­ation and loss, par­tic­u­larly when con­sid­ered within a cli­mate change par­a­digm. A com­mon strat­egy for man­ag­ing wet­lands in North Amer­ica is to first screen projects that have the poten­tial to impact wet­land habi­tats on the basis of the pro­po­nents’ capac­ity to avoid sig­nif­i­cant harm; sec­ondly, reg­u­la­tors con­sider plans and design fea­tures that min­i­mize impacts; and thirdly, the pro­po­nent may be required to com­pen­sate for the loss of wet­land habi­tat through wet­land cre­ation, restora­tion, recla­ma­tion, or a cash pay­ment. Despite the con­tin­ued reliance on this “mit­i­ga­tion” sequence, there is broad agree­ment that the first and most impor­tant step, avoid­ance, is ignored more often than it is imple­mented. Draw­ing on eval­u­a­tive lit­er­a­ture on wet­land pol­icy imple­men­ta­tion in the US, and more specif­i­cally, from a case study involv­ing a set of inter­views with key wet­land pol­icy actors in the Alberta con­text, I will sum­ma­rize com­mon decision-making prac­tices that explain why wet­land avoid­ance is com­monly over­looked in the per­mit­ting process, and why as a pol­icy direc­tive, avoid­ance is sel­dom effec­tive. By crit­i­cally exam­in­ing fac­tors that influ­ence wet­land per­mit­ting deci­sions, improve­ments can be made to wet­land law, reg­u­la­tion, and pol­icy such that losses can be pre­vented, rather than sim­ply fol­low­ing a pat­tern of per­mit­ting losses, and hop­ing that com­pen­sa­tion will replace or off-set lost wet­land area, val­ues, and functions.