What’s it about in short: On Novem­ber 3 Pres­i­dent Obama issued a mem­o­ran­dum encour­ag­ing a stan­dard set of prac­tices across sev­eral fed­eral depart­ments and agen­cies for the appli­ca­tion of the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy, includ­ing offsetting.

When was it released: Novem­ber 3, 2015

By whom: Barack Obama, White House

More info: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/03/mitigating-impacts-natural-resources-development-and-encouraging-related and see also the related LinkedIn dis­cus­sion

Short extract:

As efforts across the coun­try have demon­strated, it is pos­si­ble to achieve strong envi­ron­men­tal out­comes while encour­ag­ing devel­op­ment and pro­vid­ing ser­vices to the Amer­i­can peo­ple. This occurs through poli­cies that direct the plan­ning nec­es­sary to address harm­ful impacts on nat­ural resources by avoid­ing and min­i­miz­ing impacts, then com­pen­sat­ing for impacts that do occur. More­over, when oppor­tu­ni­ties to off­set fore­see­able harm­ful impacts to nat­ural resources are avail­able in advance, agen­cies and project pro­po­nents have more options to achieve pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal out­comes and poten­tially reduce per­mit­ting timelines.