DISCUSSION PAPER
May 2016

RFF DP 16-16
Ecosystem Services
Find Their Federal
Footing: A History
of the 2008 Farm Bill
and 2012 Forest
Planning Rule
James Boyd
1616 P St. NW
Washington, DC 20036
202-328-5000 www.rff.org
Ecosystem Services Find Their Federal Footing:
A History of the 2008 Farm Bill and 2012 Forest Planning Rule
James Boyd
Abstract
This paper details the history of two important federal initiatives that call for ecosystem services
analysis to support government decisionmaking: the Conservation Title of the 2008 Farm Bill and the US
Forest Service’s 2012 Forest Planning Rule. These initiatives are distinctive because they demonstrate
that ecosystem services analysis and management can clear the significant political, legal, and
institutional hurdles associated with national legislation and regulatory reform. The reforms’ history holds
a variety of lessons for ecosystem services advocates and practitioners.
Key Words: ecosystem services, natural resource management
© 2016 Resources for the Future. All rights reserved. No portion of this paper may be reproduced without
permission of the authors.
Discussion papers are research materials circulated by their authors for purposes of information and discussion.
They have not necessarily undergone formal peer review.
Contents
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
2. The History: A Thumbnail Sketch .................................................................................... 3
3. The History: Antecedents ................................................................................................... 4
The Ecosystem Services Movement ................................................................................... 4
Internal Science Capability and Culture ............................................................................. 4
Public Engagement around Resource Management ........................................................... 5
4. Ecosystem Services Markets in the 2008 Farm Bill ......................................................... 6
Brainstorming ..................................................................................................................... 7
An Emerging Focus ............................................................................................................ 8
Internal Dialogue ................................................................................................................ 9
Other Voices, Other Players ............................................................................................. 10
Circulation of Proposals .................................................................................................... 12
Legislation, Transition, and Implementation .................................................................... 14
5. The 2012 Forest Planning Rule........................................................................................ 16
A Top Priority and Clear Vision ....................................................................................... 19
Internal Science Assessments ........................................................................................... 20
Betting on a Consultative Reform Process ....................................................................... 23
Being Ready to Implement ............................................................................................... 26
6. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 28
References .............................................................................................................................. 30
Resources for the Future
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Ecosystem Services Find Their Federal Footing:
A History of the 2008 Farm Bill and 2012 Forest Planning Rule
James Boyd
1. Introduction
Natural resources produce a wide variety of socially important and economically valuable
ecosystem goods and services, including clean and abundant water; air quality; recreationally,
aesthetically, and commercially valuable species; and coastal storm and flood protection. A
virtue of ecosystem services analysis is that it describes both the ecological ramifications of
policy options and their corresponding social and economic implications. A related virtue is the
ability to identify, communicate, and help resolve trade-offs among competing environmental
and social objectives. Federal agencies have a growing capacity to produce and apply the
required interdisciplinary analysis. Backed by a broad intellectual consensus and proponents
from the business, NGO, and academic communities, federal initiatives increasingly call for
ecosystem services analysis to support government decisionmaking (EPA 1999; PCAST 2011;
CEQ 2013; Scarlett and Boyd 2015; EOP 2015).
But while the ecosystem services (ES) movement has gained tremendous ground in the
last decade, ES-based decisionmaking is by no means entrenched in federal practice, despite its
virtues. In part, this is because ES analysis and management are not legally mandated and thus
remain administratively optional for most agencies. Legal analyses conclude that existing
environmental statutes and procedures do not prohibit ecosystem services analysis and
management (Bear 2014; Smyth 2014; Ruhl et al. 2007; Fischman 2001). But that is not the
same thing as requiring such analysis and management.1

Senior fellow, Resources for the Future; and director of social science and policy, National
SocioEnvironmental Synthesis Center. This study was supported by a grant from the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation.
1A
recent survey of federal resource managers engaged in ecosystem services analysis concludes that
“they appear much more likely to respond to mandates, or instructions about mandates, than to general
positive authority (such as NEPA) or even abstract “guidance” that interprets or builds on the more
general authority” (Presnall et al. 2015, 37).
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Two notable exceptions, and the focus of this paper, are the 2012 US Forest Service’s
Forest Planning Rule (FPR) and the Conservation Title of the 2008 Farm Bill, both recent
innovations within the domain of the US Department of Agriculture. The 2012 Planning Rule
specifically requires “integrated resource management to provide for ecosystem services and
multiple uses.”2 The 2008 Farm Bill requires the secretary of agriculture to “establish technical
guidelines that outline science-based methods to measure the environmental services benefits
from conservation and land management activities in order to facilitate the participation of
farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging environmental services markets.” The
Farm Bill directive led to USDA’s creation of the Office of Environmental Markets (OEM).
The FPR is particularly important because it governs analysis and planning for the entire
National Forest System, comprising more than 190M acres and 8.5 percent of the nation’s total
land area. The Farm Bill’s ecosystem services language does not require ES-based management,
and therefore its environmental and administrative importance in the near term is more modest.
Nevertheless, Congress’s mandate to establish guidelines for environmental service markets
could, and at the time seemed to, have enormous potential consequences for private and public
landowners and managers.
Relative to less formal guidelines and guidance, mandates are notable because they
typically have to clear higher political, legal, technical, and administrative hurdles to achieve the
force of regulation or statute. This is the story of how the FPR, Farm Bill, and OEM cleared
those hurdles and what that might mean for future federal ecosystem services initiatives.3
The paper’s focus is not on the FPR’s and OEM’s concrete, and ultimately more
important, achievements in terms of environmental and social outcomes. The FPR is too new for
such an assessment, and the OEM, for reasons described later, has had a limited effect on
ecosystem services market development. Rather, the focus is on the institutional and political
achievement of getting the FPR and OEM legally and administratively established.
“Multiple use” forest analysis and management has been mandated for decades and is related to the
ecosystem services concept in that it asks resource managers to balance a variety of public, forest-related
benefits. However, as described later, multiple-use analysis in practice captured a relatively narrow set of
forest benefits (Collins et al. 2014).
3 Beyond cited documents, this history is based on interviews with individuals involved in the
development of the OEM and FPR, including Sally Collins, Robert Doudrick, Arlen Lancaster, Meryl
Harrell, Mark Rey, Harris Sherman, and Tony Tooke. Any errors of fact or interpretation are the
responsibility of the author.
2
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The two stories are linked, with common institutional and intellectual antecedents. Also,
their institutional success can be tied to similar features. Both were built on significant
commitments to the scientific underpinnings of ecosystem services management. Both go
beyond science to address how the science matters to policy and management. Both featured
processes designed to foster input, creativity, and learning prior to proposed actions. Both
emphasized buy-in from the external stakeholder community. Both involved extensive
intragovernmental vetting. And both received sustained and effective attention from agency
leaders.
2. The History: A Thumbnail Sketch
Active development of what became the OEM and FRP spanned a seven-year period
from 2005 to 2012. In 2005, a team within the Forest Service, assisted by USDA leadership,
created a working group to foster coordination between the Forest Service and Natural Resources
Conservation Service around ecosystem services management, payments, and markets. In
consultation with other agencies, this group ultimately proposed language to be included in the
2008 Farm Bill calling for a USDA-led program that would promote and develop environmental
markets for habitat, water quality, and carbon sequestration. Early proposals were financially and
institutionally ambitious (a $50M Office of Ecosystem Services Markets to coordinate market
development across the federal government). Farm Bill negotiations in 2008 and the transition to
a new presidency in 2009 resulted in a much more modest reality: a $1M program—the OEM—
focused on development of technical guidelines to foster market development.
The FPR was developed during the new Obama presidency, between 2010 and 2011, and
as a high priority for the new political leadership within USDA and the Forest Service (FS). The
new rule was finalized in April 2012, superseding the previous planning rule established 30 years
earlier, in 1982. Over that span, there were several unsuccessful attempts by multiple
administrations to change the Planning Rule. In that light, the new rule is an important regulatory
achievement even without its notable ecosystem services provisions. The FPR did not share the
OEM’s emphasis on market development, but the two did share an emphasis on the analysis and
management of ecosystem services. That emphasis was born of a shared intellectual incubation
period going back decades within USDA and the FS.
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3. The History: Antecedents
The Ecosystem Services Movement
Several intellectual and policy trends reflected in the Farm Bill and FPR converged in the
mid-2000s. The first was the growth of the ecosystem services movement, which emphasizes the
connection between healthy natural systems and social and economic welfare. The basic idea is
not new and was in fact cited at the birth of the conservation movement more than 100 years ago.
The very first Conference of Governors, brought together by President Theodore Roosevelt in
1908, declared the nation’s natural resources “the foundation of our prosperity” and “the material
basis on which our civilization must continue to depend.” Fifty years later that idea spawned a
dedicated academic discipline, environmental economics, with the Ford Foundation in 1952
creating an organization—Resources for the Future—dedicated to its development. The field
deepened and flourished throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as environmental issues gained
broader social attention (Pearce 2002), with, for example, the emergence of ecological
economics as a distinct field in the 1980s (Ropke 2004).
For conservationists and natural scientists, the embrace of economic language, principles,
and issue framing began in the 1980s and 1990s. The term nature’s services was coined in 1977
(Westman 1977). Published in 1997, ecologist Gretchen Daily’s book Nature’s Services was
influential in propagating joint ecological-social analysis within the natural science and
conservation communities (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). The 2003 Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, a global and pandisciplinary inquiry into ecological-social linkages, solidified the
ecosystem services concept in policy circles in the United States and abroad.
Internal Science Capability and Culture
Several of the features that contributed to the FPR’s and OEM’s successes can be traced
to features of the US Forest Service and USDA as institutions. As noted earlier, both were built
on commitments to the scientific underpinnings of ecosystem services management. Both the FS
and USDA have long histories of marrying scientific research to its practical application.
In 1876 Congress called for the appointment by USDA of a forest agent to
“determine the annual amount of consumption, importation, and exportation of
timber and other forest products, the probable supply for future wants, the means
best adapted to their preservation and renewal, the influence of forests upon
climates, and the measures that have been successfully applied in foreign
countries, or that may be deemed applicable in this country, for the preservation
and restoration or planting of forests.”
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From these beginnings came the establishment of a dedicated Research Branch in 1915
and regional experiment stations in the 1910s and ’20s. Among other things, these forest research
programs explored the relationship between grazing and forest health and the effects of forest
cover on flooding. In 1928 the McSweeney-McNary Research Act authorized and provided
appropriations for forest research on a broad scale. The act also led USDA to establish the
Division of Wildlife Research, which in the late 1930s was merged with fishery research
programs and transferred to the Department of Interior, becoming the new Fish and Wildlife
Service (FWS). The FS has been collecting annual national data on the status and trends of forest
resources since 1930, in the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program.4 Today the FS operates five
regional research stations, with 67 associated research labs complemented by 80 experimental
forests. A history of science within the FS and USDA is beyond the scope of this paper (see
Nelson 1971; Steen 1977), but it is worth noting the longevity and depth of environmental
research within the Forest Service.
Public Engagement around Resource Management
Another feature of the US Department of Agriculture, and specifically the US Forest
Service within it, is the degree to which their missions involve not just resource stewardship, but
also the engagement of the public in natural resource management. The ability to deal with
environmental issues from both a scientific standpoint and a social perspective can be traced to
the institutions’ history and missions.
From the beginning, the Forest Service’s vast land holdings and impact on surrounding
resources and economic activity led to extensive engagement with private landowners, including
the private forestry sector. With the mandates of the Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act of 1960
and National Forest Management Act of 1976, the FS was called—in the words of the 1976
act—to serve the national interest “through analysis of environmental and economic impacts,
coordination of multiple use and sustained yield opportunities … and public participation.”
Comprehensive land management plans and active public participation in decisionmaking have
been hallmarks of the Forest Service’s mission since the 1970s (LeMaster 1984) and in a way
that predates many of the nation’s other “environmental” agencies.5
The FS forest inventory is mirrored by USDA’s Natural Resource Inventory (NRI), which since the
1930s has collected information on soil erosion and since 1977 on soils, land use, and water.
5 Given our emphasis on ecosystem services, it is also worth noting that in the 1960s the Forest Service
pioneered research on outdoor recreation (Camp 1983).
4
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The Forest Service’s overarching vision of “Caring for the Land and Serving People,”
coined in 1985, captures both the social and biophysical aspects of natural resource management
emphasized by the ecosystem services movement. This is not to say that the Forest Service
always easily and effectively resolved conflicts arising from people’s divergent interests (e.g.,
the conflict between timber harvests and protection of the Northern Spotted Owl). But it does
mean that the Forest Service has a history of dealing with public resource conflicts and largelandscape management affecting diverse local communities.
Historically, USDA and Forest Service extension, cooperative services, and engagement
with private sector resource extractors (forestry, mining, grazing, and agriculture) have also
contributed to cultures that emphasize collaboration—often at a very local scale—between the
agencies and landowners and communities.
Intellectually, the ecosystem services approach to analysis and management emphasizes
(1) the dependence of social outcomes on natural resource conditions, (2) the centrality of social
needs and desires to guide how natural resources should be protected and managed, (3) the desire
to illuminate, or even resolve, trade-offs associated with resource management, and (4) the need
for landscape-scale thinking about how resource management affects ecological and social
outcomes. The Forest Service’s practical experience and history closely complement these
intellectual themes. In hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that the ecosystem services concept
found adherents and organizational traction within the FS. (In fact, a deeper intellectual history
might establish that the ecosystem services movement owes a debt to the service’s history.) And
arguably, the evolution of science-based multiple-use landscape management to capture a
broader suite of ecosystem services was natural, if not inevitable.
The service’s decades-long experience with public engagement, landscape-scale resource
conflicts, and “retail” engagement with private resource managers also contributed to its ability
to clear the political hurdles necessary to get ecosystem services mandates established in law and
regulation.
4. Ecosystem Services Markets in the 2008 Farm Bill
To date, the legislative high-water mark for ecosystem services governance occurred on
July 23, 2007, when the US House of Representative passed a farm bill authorizing $50M over
five years to support the creation of an Environmental Services Standards Board “to develop
consistent performance standards for quantifying environmental services from land management
and agricultural activities in order to facilitate the development of credit markets for
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conservation and land management activities that are agriculture or forest based.”6 When enacted
in May 2008 the Senate had removed from the Farm Bill both the appropriation and requirement
to create a standards board, leaving budgetary and administrative details to the discretion of the
secretary of agriculture. The result, under the new Obama administration, was the creation of the
Office of Environmental Markets, but with only a $1M annual budget.
Nevertheless, the July 2007 achievement was significant. It is so far the only time US
legislation has acknowledged ecosystem services as a concept relevant to natural resource
management. Also, it came close to providing significant funding for research on and
experimentation with ecosystem services policy applications. How did USDA and the Forest
Service get as far as they did?
The antecedents noted earlier played a role: the growth of the ecosystem services
movement outside the federal government, as well as the agencies’ science- and public
engagement–friendly institutional cultures. But other themes emerge from the story, including
the role of internal leadership and the responsiveness of that leadership to broader economic and
environmental trends.
Brainstorming
Based on their own experiences and input from private and NGO sector partners, Forest
Service leaders were confronting several trends affecting the service’s mission. These trends
included the globalization of timber markets, the growth of forest certification programs, interest
in market-based environmental incentives, and forests as producers of ecosystem services, not
just timber production. In the early 2000s conflicts arising from the tension between the service’s
promotion of timber markets and its mandate to manage for multiple uses (as in the Spotted Owl
controversy) also colored Forest Service thinking. Another clear sense was that government
funding for conservation, whether from the service, USDA generally, or any other source, was
on the decline. In this context, ecosystem services thinking had intriguing implications. First, it
offered a way to acknowledge, measure, and manage the broad portfolio of socially valuable
services produced by forests. Second, talk of payments for those valuable services seemed like a
way to address the increasingly tight fiscal situation (the question of who would do the paying
remained murky). Third, by stressing the connection between nature’s services and the people
6
H.R. 2419, House Report 110-256, Sec. 2407, July 23, 2007.
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who depend on them, the language of ecosystem services could help underscore the Forest
Service’s mandate to support more than just timber production.
Against this backdrop, the service started exploring the relevance of ecosystem services
and market incentives to its mission. With the backing of Chief Dale Bosworth, the service in
2001 created a headquarters team to explore the science of ecosystem services and its
implications for forest management. A kind of “skunk works” inside the FS, the team conducted
analysis to establish the service’s bona fides should the idea gain more traction in policy circles.
In addition to carbon sequestration, the team explored forests’ role in water quality, water
availability, and flooding and fire as a threat to ecosystem services. It also started thinking about
the role of markets and payments for ecosystem services. Could payments be generated from
municipalities threatened by fire and associated water quality problems to accelerate public
forest conservation? Could revenue be generated to support conservation in private forests?
An Emerging Focus
Not all of the answers were encouraging. For example, the team explored whether
managed forest regeneration (postfire or on nonforest lands) would generate more carbon
sequestration and found that passive regeneration would generally produce more carbon more
quickly.7 It also surveyed water quality trading experiments with the Environmental Protection
Agency and states and found problems limiting both the supply of and demand for water quality
credits.
The problem was not that forests did not produce valuable goods and services, but rather
that metrics used to measure them were underdeveloped. If the Forest Service were to manage
ecosystem services, how would performance be evaluated? If environmental improvements were
to be paid for, how would the improvement relative to a baseline be measured and verified? How
were multiple environmental benefits resulting from conservation or management to be “added
up?” How would ecosystem services buyers know what they were buying and sellers know what
to sell? The sense was that ecosystem services management (whether or not via market
incentives) required broad consensus around performance standards and metrics—an inherently
scientific and technical requirement. And markets, if they were to develop, required a policy,
administrative, and financial architecture that did not currently exist. In the words of Sally
7
The service used its Forest Vegetation Simulator to conduct these analyses, as in Smith et al. (2006).
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Collins, “Small markets for air, water, and biodiversity exist, but they are scattered across
government agencies, inconsistently applied, and very difficult and confusing for land owners to
participate in.”8
Internal Dialogue
Parallel to the research effort was a series of annual meetings starting in 2003 that
convened the Forest Service’s top senior executives. The meetings were brainstorming retreats in
Oaxaca, Mexico, to discuss science developments, global trends, and the future of the service.
The message from leadership was to be creative, think big, and reflect on what they were hearing
from the outside world. Participants credit the meetings with influencing what would become
longer-term strategies, including ecosystem services–based revisions to the Planning Rule,
support for community-based forestry, responses to climate policy, and forest and sustainability
certification. And in particular, the meetings helped set the stage and build the case internally for
what would become USDA’s ecosystem markets farm bill proposal.
Another development was the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service’s (NRCS’s)
growing interest in environmental markets. In 2005 USDA’s undersecretary for natural resources
and environment called for development of an environmental markets proposal for the next farm
bill and formed a “market-based stewardship council” led jointly by the Forest Service and
NRCS to develop proposals and briefing materials.9
NRCS was the natural “farms” counterpart to the service’s “forests” focus. As the leader
of USDA conservation programs (e.g., Conservation Reserve Program, Environmental Quality
Incentives Program), NRCS had been moving toward a greater emphasis on measuring
conservation performance, payments, and standards. Notably, the 2002 Farm Bill had created the
Conservation Innovation Grants program to, among other things, provide matching grants for
innovative approaches to market-based pollution reduction programs related to agricultural
production. The NRCS’s and Forest Service’s shared vision of, and coordination around,
ecosystem markets created a valuable united front for their subsequent proposals. Forest Service
and NRCS leaders were charged with development of a broad, integrated national market for
environmental services involving both the public and private sectors. A particular goal was to
8
Collins Powerpoint presentation, on file with author.
Around this same time the Forest Service officially designated an “environmental markets program,”
with dedicated staff, focused on environmental markets’ support to private-sector forest managers.
9
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think about the structure of such markets and the role of a government oversight infrastructure—
to set standards, define credits and currency, and promote verification and transparency.
Other Voices, Other Players
An obvious question was why USDA should be the home of a federal environmental
markets initiative and how it would coordinate with other agencies pursuing their own marketbased programs.10 One argument was the raw geographic reality: a huge expanse of US lands
was either directly managed or indirectly affected by USDA and FS programs. Another was
USDA’s experience with payments to private landowners. Then there was the argument that
someone needed to be the home for efforts to generate consistency around conservation
performance measures. The fact that the FS and NRCS already presided over various programby-program performance criteria (in need of reconciliation) and that they nevertheless were
united in calling for greater consistency was a good signal. USDA was also in the process of
finalizing partnership agreements with EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service to establish water
quality and habitat trading markets. Outside USDA, EPA and the Department of Energy were
developing guidance for greenhouse gas credits, and the Army Corps of Engineers was
administering wetland compensation banking under the Clean Water Act. How were those to be
reconciled?11 It seemed clear that the inability to reconcile these various mechanisms, and the
standards employed by them, would inhibit the development of national environmental markets.
The Executive Office of the President (EOP) was the natural convener for resolution of
interagency issues. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and Office of Management
and Budget initiated a secretary-level interagency group to explore the proposals being raised by
USDA. Out of this came a set of USDA briefing materials and initial proposals for CEQ, as well
as a report to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
10
Market-based environmental policies had been advocated for decades and found their first US
application in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which established a tradable permits program to
limit sulfur emissions from power plants. With the success of that program, the next decade saw
numerous explorations of market-based policies applied to land development, water quantity and quality,
and species habitat.
11 See Section 1605(b) of the Energy Policy Act of 1992;
www.nrcs.usda.gov/news/releases/2006/usdaepawqagreement.html; and
www.fws.gov/endangered/pdfs/Credit_Trading_MOU.pdf.
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In 2006 NRCS began discussions with Hill staff about including environmental markets
language in the coming farm bill. USDA shared with Congress its sense that the public was
increasingly supportive of environmental markets. During 2005 and 2006 Agriculture Secretary
Mike Johanns held forums around the country to get public input for the next farm bill. Public
comments noted farms’ role in supporting environmental benefits, from water quality to species
habitat, the need to expand financial support for conservation, and the desirability of targeting
incentives to get the greatest possible environmental benefit.12 Based on this, USDA concluded,
among other things, that conservation programs could be improved by making greater use of
watershed and landscape approaches, incorporating activities that use or facilitate environmental
market mechanisms, encouraging private sector markets to complement or potentially replace
federally supported conservation efforts. This would require the development of consistent
standards for estimating environmental goods and services provided by agriculture and forestry,
including standards for data quality, verification, reporting, and estimation methods.13 Overall,
the prospect of new income streams for farmers, ranchers, and forest land owners was politically
compelling.
At the time, these conclusions were not a hard sell, given what was happening around
climate policy. In 2003 Republican John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman proposed an
act to apply permit trading to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a proposal introduced again in
2005 and 2007 by both Republicans and Democrats. It is worth remembering that, at the time,
the need for climate policy and market solutions had bipartisan support. The business and
investment community, as well, embraced the idea of GHG markets. Between 2003 and 2010,
and partly in anticipation of GHG regulation, the Chicago Climate Exchange actively traded
GHG credits on the open market. In that atmosphere it is not surprising that, according to a
Congressional Research Service report, “The participation of agriculture and forestry in
emerging environmental services markets is gaining wide support within the farm community
and its supporting organizations and agencies, as well as among the regulatory agencies and
some environmental groups” (Johnson 2009, 2).
12
USDA, Farm Bill Forum Comment Summary and Background, March 28, 2006, available at
http://www.usda.gov/documents/GENERAL_CONSERVATION.pdf.
13 USDA, Conservation and the Environment, June 2006, Executive Summary,
http://www.usda.gov/documents/FarmBill07consenvsum.pdf.
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Circulation of Proposals
As Secretary Johanns said, “I see a future where credits for clean water, greenhouse
gases, or wetlands can be traded as easily as corn or soybeans.”14 While administrations and
Congress do not normally interact prior to farm bill negotiations, in this case Secretary Johanns
detailed USDA’s environmental proposals—including draft language—in advance of
negotiations.
In 2006 and early 2007 memos emerging from the FS and NRCS effort outlined the
rationale for, and key aspects of, USDA’s approach. The memos highlighted the ecosystem
services concept: “Forests and open spaces provide a full suite of goods and services that are
vital to human health and livelihood—natural assets we call ecosystem services.”15
“Environmental goods and services, or ecosystem services, are commonly defined as the benefits
people obtain from ecosystems. Ecosystem services include clean water, clean air, healthy
wildlife, spiritual values, and a whole host of benefits that are critical to human health and wellbeing.”16 Part of the idea was to make the value of ecosystem goods and services more relevant
to both public and private decisionmaking. According to one Forest Service leader, “We are
losing valuable ecosystem services to development, in part because values like clean water, clean
air, and wildlife habitat have no ‘market value.’ By developing these new markets, a “market
signal” or value could be established, better enabling these key resources to compete with other
land uses, like agriculture.”17
Congress would ultimately direct USDA and OEM to focus primarily on carbon markets.
But at the time, markets for a broader suite of environmental services were being proposed. As a
Congressional Research Service (CRS) analysis explained, the goal was “to facilitate the
participation of farmers and landowners in environmental services markets, covering a range of
farm and forestry services, including improved water and air quality, increased carbon storage,
and habitat protection” (Johnson 2009, 1).
14
NRCS, Forest Service, and USDA Office of the Chief Economist, Proposed New 2007 Farm Bill Title:
Market-Based Approaches to Enhance Environmental Benefits, April 13, 2006, 1 (hereafter Market Based
Approaches memo, 2006).
15 Ibid.
16 “Market Based Conservation Questions and Answers,” January 30, 2007, 2 (hereafter Questions and
Answers, 2007).
17 Collins Powerpoint presentation, on file with author.
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The environmental motivation was married to a fiscal motivation, the anticipated decline
in Farm Bill conservation funding. The sense was that the 2002 Farm Bill represented the highwater mark for conservation funding and that new sources of revenue would be needed.18
Environmental markets, where private demanders could purchase environmental credits from
landowners or finance improvements on public lands, seemed to address this fiscal issue.
According to USDA, “access to private sector funding will provide for continued investment in
conservation independent of what happens to current conservation programs in the long term,”19
and “once the market is established, new resources will become available from private capital
invested in the marketplace.”20 The CRS concluded that environmental goods and services from
the agriculture and forestry sectors might provide environmental improvements at lower cost
compared with other sectors of the economy and that “markets may also offer additional
financial opportunities to farmers and landowners” (Johnson 2009, 1).
From these motivations, USDA proceeded to its conclusion: what was needed was an
institutional framework to develop, stimulate, and build confidence in ecosystem services
markets.21 USDA argued that government leadership was necessary and that a new Farm Bill
title was the best way to promote market development. The idea was for USDA to create, under
the new conservation title, a standards board, oversight commission, and potentially an insurance
underwriter and lending institution.22 The standards board, composed of representatives from
federal agencies (EPA, FWS, Army Corps of Engineers, etc.) and state, local, and tribal
governments, would establish standards, measurement tools, and performance rules for a broad,
national environmental marketplace.23 A new USDA office would lead administration of these
“Competition for Federal funds suggests there will be a growing need to find more efficient ways to
design programs to meet the broad range of conservation needs and to deliver more cost-effective
conservation technical assistance.” United States Department of Agriculture–2007 Farm Bill Theme
Papers, June 2006, 19 (hereafter USDA–2007 Farm Bill Theme Papers). Also see Ribaudo et al. (2008).
19 Questions and Answers, 2007, 5.
20 Ibid., 2.
21 “Limited work has been done to develop private sector markets for environmental goods and services
and use these markets to allocate more efficiently and effectively federal and private sector funding for
conservation programs.” USDA–2007 Farm Bill Theme Papers, 20.
22 Questions and Answers, 2007, 4.
18
23
Market Based Approaches memo, 2006, 7.
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activities, as well as provide technical support. While the effort would be USDA led, the
intention was for USDA to promote needed cooperation across the federal agencies.24
In January 2007 USDA proposals included a recommendation to invest $50M to
“encourage new private sector environmental markets to supplement existing conservation and
forestry programs“ and “develop uniform standards for quantifying environmental services;
establish credit registries; and offer credit audit and certification services.”25
Legislation, Transition, and Implementation
As noted earlier, these proposals, including a $50M appropriation and authorization for
an Environmental Services Standards Board, passed the House in July 2007. The enacted bill
created a new conservation title calling on the secretary of agriculture to establish “technical
guidelines that outline science-based methods to measure the environmental services benefits
from conservation and land management activities in order to facilitate the participation of
farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging environmental services markets.”26
However, negotiations leading to the enacted bill in 2008 removed authorization for the
standards board. In terms of funding, USDA was expected to “fulfill the intent of this section
with resources available to the Department.”27 Another change was for USDA to give “priority
to establishment of guidelines related to … carbon markets.”
In the end, these legislative changes led to a significant curtailment of ambitions, relative
to USDA’s original vision and proposals. One particular problem was the timing of the bill
relative to a change in administration. The bill was passed just months before the 2008
presidential election. Implementation of the title, as well as the core issue of its funding, would
have to wait on the transition to new leaders in the EOP and USDA. As with any political
transition, new leaders do not necessarily share the old leadership’s vision. Programs created
“Congress could authorize USDA and Federal regulatory agencies to cooperate to ensure that
environmental goods produced by agriculture can be used to offset their regulatory requirements in other
sectors.” USDA–2007 Farm Bill Theme Papers, 29, www.usda.gov/documents/FarmBill07consenv.pdf.
25 Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, letter to Congress, USDA 2007 Farm Bill Proposals, January 30,
2007, proposals to Hill, available at www.usda.gov/documents/07finalfbp.pdf.
24
26
27
The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, H.R. 2419, Sec 2709.
See Johnson (2009) for a legislative history of negotiations around the final bill.
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right before a transition, as this one was, are particularly susceptible to skepticism and
reevaluation.
Between the bill’s enactment and the inauguration, USDA announced that it would create
a Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board, a federally chartered
public advisory committee, and an Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets (OESM) (see
Johnson 2009). OESM’s FY2009 budget request was for $5M and approximately a dozen fulltime staff. Prior to the transition and in the final 2009 budget, however, the discretion afforded
the (new) agriculture secretary by the title resulted in an office (now title the Office of
Environmental Markets), but without the board or advisory committee and with a FY2009
budget allocation of only $970K.
Timing is everything. Competing objectives, a lack of time to build the case, and a lack
of ownership on the part of new leaders—all while trying to establish a new office—proved to be
big hurdles for OESM’s leaders and supporters across USDA. Another hurdle ended up being
Congress’s pivot to carbon markets as a priority for the new office. While that focus seemed
reasonable—if narrower than USDA’s vision—in 2007, by 2009 and 2010 the politics of carbon
and carbon markets were changing fast. The Waxman-Markey greenhouse gas emissions trading
scheme passed the House in 2009 but failed in the Senate in 2010 as the US political
environment turned away from climate legislation. The Chicago Climate Exchange shuttered in
2010. Whereas a few years earlier carbon had seemed to be environmental markets’ low-hanging
fruit, it had become a nonstarter.
Can the OEM be considered a success? Relative to the vision that motivated it, the
answer is no. The idea of creating an interagency governance platform to reconcile, develop, and
guide national ecosystem services markets demanded scale, in terms of budget, expertise,
personnel, and institutional reach. Scale was not achieved.
On the other hand, the OEM continues to exist, in a kind of holding pattern, as a program
in USDA’s Office of the Chief Economist. It continues to produce and support technical and
policy analysis of market-based incentives for habitat and water quality improvements.
Externally, the OEM tapped into NGO, business, and policy interest in environmental markets
and continues to be USDA’s “face” for ecosystem services thinking. Externally, and politically,
the ecosystem services concept proved to be viable.
Perhaps more important, the vision had received support and collaboration from a diverse
array of federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior and EPA, and the Office of
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Management and Budget and CEQ. The idea also seemed to be politically viable from an
internal, federal perspective.
In particular, the OEM effort created and built on a notable synergy between the Forest
Service and NRCS, two distinct arms of USDA in terms of mission and jurisdiction. This point
was not lost on new Obama administration appointees. Though the OEM was clearly a product
of the previous administration, the new administration’s interest was piqued by the energy and
analysis behind the effort, as well as the broad, positive reaction to ecosystem services thinking,
both within and outside the government.
The OEM effort would have a legacy via its impact on conservation thinking in USDA
under the new administration. One example was the Forests to Faucets program, which explored
payments for watershed services to finance forest conservation.28 Other examples include the
Forest Service’s collaboration with the Denver Water Board to cofinance $32M for forest
restoration work in the Denver municipal watershed to minimize water quality impacts caused by
wildfires and Flagstaff, Arizona’s, $10M bond measure to fund forest restoration to reduce flood
risks (Deal et al. 2014). The OEM effort also contributed to the development of the Forest
Planning Rule, to which we now turn.
5. The 2012 Forest Planning Rule
The new Forest Planning Rule (FPR), described as “the most substantive change in
federal forest policy in 30 years” (Schultz et al. 2013, 428), was enacted in May 2012.29 The
National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA; P.L. 94-588) established a tiered approach to
forest planning regulations, where overarching national regulations govern the development of
regional forest plans that in turn govern forest- and site-specific management actions. The FPR
sets forth principles and procedures for the development of those plans. Plans set mandatory
requirements and discretionary guidelines for a wide range of forest management actions related
to timber harvests; soil, water, and habitat protection and restoration; and recreation. The FPR
has a significant impact on the nation’s 190M acres of national forests, since any management
action on those lands is guided by, and must be consistent with, the priorities and plans
established under national and regional regulations.
28
29
http://www.fs.fed.us/ecosystemservices/FS_Efforts/forests2faucets.shtml.
Federal Register, 77:68, April 9, 2012, 21162 (hereafter Federal Register).
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Prior to 2012 the Forest Service had on several occasions attempted to review the 1982
Planning Rule, most recently in 2000, 2005, and 2008.30 The attempts foundered for a variety of
political, legal, and procedural reasons. Nevertheless, FPR revisions were a top priority for the
Forest Service under the Obama administration. The 1982 rules were considered by the service
to be “not current with regard to science, knowledge of the environment, practices for planning
and adaptive management, or social values.”31 The 2012 FPR addresses many of these
shortcomings by, for example, establishing new science practices for the monitoring and
conservation of species diversity. But in addition, the 2012 rule makes a significant shift to
consideration of ecosystem services in forest analysis and planning.
As described earlier, the ecosystem services approach to analysis and management has
several core features: it emphasizes (1) the dependence of social outcomes on natural resource
conditions, (2) the centrality of social needs and desires to guide how natural resources should be
protected and managed, (3) the desire to illuminate, or even resolve, trade-offs associated with
resource management, and (4) the need for landscape-scale thinking about how resource
management affects ecological and social outcomes. All of these elements are featured
prominently in the 2012 rule.
While noting that ecosystem services is a “relatively new term,” the service argued that
the concept is entirely consistent with the authority given by NMFA to consider the full range of
values, uses, and benefits provided by forest lands.32 The rule stresses both ecological and social
sustainability and calls for management such that national forest lands will have the capacity to
“provide people and communities with ecosystem services and multiple uses that provide a range
of social, economic, and ecological benefits for the present and into the future” (36 CFR
219.1(c)).
The rule’s formal definition of ecosystem services—“the benefits people obtain from
ecosystems” (36 CRF 219.19)—is explicitly illustrated via reference to the Millennium
Ecosystem Services Assessment’s concepts of provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural
30
For descriptions of litigation and controversy surrounding previous planning rules, see Corbin (1999),
Duncan and Thompson (2006), and Schultz et al. (2013).
31 Federal Register, 21168.
32 Ibid., 21220.
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ecosystem services. The record of decision makes clear that the term is meant to encompass both
market and nonmarket goods and services.33
It is clear from the service’s thinking that a motivation for consideration of ecosystem
services was the need, not only to better acknowledge social benefits arising from forest
ecosystems, but also to enhance involvement by the public in forest decisionmaking. The
ecosystem services requirements “in combination with public participation early and throughout
the planning process, are expected to improve Agency capacity to acknowledge the relative
values of both market and non-market goods and services.”34 The commitment to public
engagement around ecosystem services benefits is notable in part because the service
acknowledged the costs of doing so, estimating an eleven-fold increase in collaboration and
public participation costs relative to the 1982 rule.35 The rationale for the commitment is both
conceptual and practical. Conceptually, plans built around public engagement in ecosystem
services are more likely to “accurately incorporate public vision and interests” and “a
meaningful, shared understanding of the social, economic, or ecological factors of importance in
the plan area.” In practical terms, and based on its experience with past planning rule conflicts,
the service expects such engagement to reduce conflict and lead to broader public support for its
plans.36
Another distinctive aspect of the rule is its emphasis on landscape-scale ecological and
social assessments, including landscape-scale analysis of ecosystem services. The rule calls on
Forest Service officials to look beyond the planning unit’s boundaries and to include in its public
collaborations participants who “might live close to a plan area or not.”37 Managers are to
33
Ibid., 21188.
More specifically, the service argues that “participation can include a greater understanding of interests
underlying the issues, a shared understanding of the conditions on the plan area and in the broader
landscape that provide the context for planning, the development of alternatives that can accommodate a
wide range of interests, and the potential development of a shared vision for the plan area, as well as an
understanding of how and why planning decisions are made.” Ibid., 21194
35 Ibid., 21186.
34
36
Ibid., 21177, 21178.
“What matters is they care about that area for some reason, can contribute to an understanding of
relevant issues, can help get planning or project work done, and can help increase organizational and
community capacity.” Ibid., 21178
37
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consider both outside factors on forest resources and the forest’s ability to deliver ecosystem
services to the surrounding region.38
For the first time, the ideas developed in the decades-long intellectual ecosystem services
movement were enshrined in federal US regulation. Not only that, but those regulations promise
to have a significant impact on management decisions affecting a huge swath of the US
landscape.
Several explanations for this success have already been noted, including the growth of
ecosystem services research in the global natural and social sciences community. The impact of
that research on the FPR is striking, including definitions lifted right out the Millennium
Assessment, an impact aided by the Forest Service’s science-friendly internal culture. Also, the
service’s history of public engagement (and experience with public conflict) around forest
management primed it to engage in participatory planning around forests’ diverse benefits to the
public. Forests’ systemic role in the provision of ecosystem services became an important part of
that discussion.
As with the Farm Bill, however, other factors were at play. This is particularly clear
given the succession of failed attempts to revise the 1982 planning rule. Why did the 2012
attempt succeed where these others had failed?
A Top Priority and Clear Vision
One explanation for the revision’s success was that reform of the FPR was immediately
considered a top priority by both career staff and the administration’s political appointees. In a
2009 speech outlining his vision for the Forest Service, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack announced
his commitment to a new planning rule, calling it the best opportunity “to integrate forest
restoration, climate resilience, watershed protection, wildlife conservation, the need for vibrant
local economies, and collaboration into how we manage our National Forests.” While he did not
utter the words “ecosystem services,” the speech hit on several ecosystem services themes,
including forests’ role in producing a spectrum of environmental benefits and the need to plan at
a landscape scale. He also noted the “history of distrust” among environmentalists, the service,
“Greater emphasis placed on identifying each unit’s role in providing ecosystem services within a
broader landscape or region should facilitate the design of management responses that recognize the
marginal effects or contributions of ecological, social, or economic conditions originating from outside of
the traditional unit study area boundaries.” Ibid., 21255.
38
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and the forestry community and argued that the way to move beyond the “timber wars of the
past” was through plans built around collaboration.39
Leaders of the regulatory reform effort were well aware of the policy and science
attention already given to ecosystem services by Forest Service staff and had observed the
positive reception across USDA to ecosystem services thinking around the OEM. Particularly
appealing was the way ecosystem services thinking addressed the “Serving People” part of the
service’s vision and its focus on better understanding social values connected to the forest
landscape. The idea that ecosystem services analysis and collaborations would help forest
managers better connect and respond to social concerns was a running theme (Smith et al. 2011).
A 2007 document argued that “an ecosystem services perspective moves land managers to frame
a purpose that reflects a broader set of values, with greater potential to resonate with the public
[and] … helps build bridges of understanding between different interest groups.” (Collins and
Larry 2007). All of this corresponded nicely with leadership’s desire to build public trust and
move beyond traditional conflicts. Moreover, efforts associated with the OEM Farm Bill
experience helped set the stage for ecosystem services thinking in the planning rule. The earlier
efforts had helped legitimize the concept within the Forest Service and revealed corresponding
support from the science and policy community.
Internal Science Assessments
The Forest Service’s historical science capacity and culture also played a significant role
in the FRP revision and reinforced the emphasis on ecosystem services. In fact, many of the
problems with the 1982 rule were “science problems.” Science practices mandated by the 1982
rule and subsequent litigation around science conflicts (mostly concerning forest management’s
effect on species) had locked the service into what it viewed as outmoded and conflict-generating
types of analysis (Schultz et al. 2013). For example, the 1982 rule led to an emphasis on analysis
of “management indicator species.” The old rule also did nothing to encourage landscape-scale
analysis and inhibited use of new monitoring and socioeconomic tools. The status quo approach
to analysis felt increasingly outmoded given science developments—related to species, climate
change, adaptive management, and ecosystem services—over the intervening 30 years.
39
www.fs.fed.us/video/tidwell/vilsack.pdf.
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In response, the new rule requires a best available scientific information (BASI) and
adaptive management (AM) approach to analysis. Joined with the rule’s commitment to greater
public engagement, the BASI and AM framing of science is meant to encourage analysis that is
as transparent and up-to-date as possible. Ecosystem services science fits well with the goal, both
because it is a contemporary approach to ecological analysis and because it emphasizes
landscape-scale, integrated analysis of ecological and social outcomes. And as noted earlier,
ecosystem services were seen as a way for the public to engage more collaboratively with the
science of public forest management issues, the hope being that this would reduce science-based
conflicts.
Internally, the recognition of a broader conception of forests’ social and ecological
benefits caused some confusion—and even opposition—because of its relationship to the
service’s existing “multiple use” mandate. The Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960
(MUSYA)40 already called on the service to manage forests for a variety of uses to meet public
needs (Bowes and Krutilla 1989). So the question arose, Aren’t multiple-use and ecosystem
services analysis the same thing, and if so, why introduce a “new” concept? Indeed, the social
benefits and needs associated with forest ecosystem services can be thought of as beneficial
forest “uses,” if uses are defined broadly. This conceptual consistency aided the inclusion of
ecosystem services in agency planning, since the service was already experienced with
multiobjective analysis and management. And since the service continues to operate under the
act, legal consistency with its provisions was important to the new rule.41 In practice, however,
MUSYA was being implemented—at least into the 1990s—more narrowly. Multiple use
management was chiefly focused on extractive human uses (timber, mining, and grazing),
species protection required by the Endangered Species Act, and recreation. The service described
the 1982 rule as “an approach … that focused on producing outputs (for example, board feet of
timber, recreation visitor days, and animal months of grazing) and mitigating the effects of
management activities on other resources.”42 In contrast, the 2012 vision was to more fully
embed in the multiple-use framework an appreciation of forests’ role in ecological systems and
40
P.L. 86–517.
The FS believes MUSYA anticipated changing conditions and needs, and the meaning of ‘‘several
products and services obtained’’ from the national forests and grasslands incorporates all values, benefits,
products, and services Americans know and expect the FS to provide. Resources like clean air and water
are among the many ecosystem services these lands provide. Federal Register, 21190.
42 Ibid., 21168.
41
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thereby put environmental and corresponding social outcomes on an equal footing with
extractive uses.43
In the 1990s, and across the service’s science programs, a shift had been under way from
“production science” (focused on extraction) to broader ecosystem analysis. The shift was driven
in part by litigation and controversy surrounding species impacts and harvesting of old-growth
forest. It was also due to generational overturn in personnel, with the service hiring a more
disciplinarily diverse group of researchers and managers. These changes, added to the external,
academic ecosystem services research movement (described in section 3) and policy initiatives
(described in section 4), led to a broadening portfolio of ecosystem services research and
capability within the FS.
With Forest Service participation, an interagency Ecosystem Services Task Team
(ESTT), created in 2008, concluded that “the concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital
provide a potentially transformative framework for decision-making and sustainable
management of our natural resources.”44 Specific to the Forest Service, and of particular note,
were several large-scale, future-oriented forest assessments conducted in the years leading up to
the 2012 FRP reform effort. These assessments were important to thinking behind, and
ultimately the shape of, the new rule. They highlighted the service’s scientific directions and
capability, including its ecosystem services research. They also helped illustrate how and why
ecosystem services were important to the Forest Service’s future mission.
The Southern Forest Resource Assessment, and subsequent Southern Forest Futures
Project, was initiated in 2007 to evaluate future forest trends and take advantage of the most
current science and monitoring data. The assessment both identified ecosystem services losses
from increased timber inventories and predicted increased demand for forest ecosystem services
due to population growth and urban development. The assessment also forecast an intensification
of water availability and quality impacts beginning in the 2020s and argued that “these effects on
ecosystem services could feed back to constrain management options in the region and affect the
trajectory of [forest] investments” (Wear and Greis 2012, 15–18).
“Land management planning today focuses on managing toward desired conditions, or outcomes,
rather than focusing simply on outputs.” Ibid. 21168.
44 Ecosystem Services Task Team, Working Paper, Draft 14, October 2014 (on file with author).
43
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Another example was the 2010 Resources Planning Act Assessment.45 The 2010
assessment noted public dependence on ecosystem services provided by forests and anticipated
increased conflict between those needs and the need for commodity production, particularly in
the face of climate change. Like the southern assessment, the 2010 assessment concluded that
demographic change was likely to increase demand for certain ecosystem services. The report
also underlined the need for proactive management of these issues because, “although markets
are quite effective at providing incentives for commodity products, incentives to provide other
ecosystem services are limited.”46 The assessment concluded, “Timely actions from
policymakers and resource managers are needed. The results from this assessment provide a
scientific foundation for their actions.”47
Betting on a Consultative Reform Process
A solid scientific foundation was important, but regulatory changes also required a solid
political, legal, and administrative footing. USDA and Forest Service leadership’s backing for
reform was strong. But leadership also guessed that reform would not succeed without broader
internal and external support. A key to the 2012 FPR’s success was investment in a consultative,
publicly transparent reform process. The perception was that earlier reform efforts had stumbled
for a variety of reasons, including compliance with NEPA requirements and reliance on a
traditional regulatory vetting process (i.e., proposal followed by notice and comment). That
conventional approach was administratively attractive. It avoided costly upfront and timeconsuming stakeholder engagement and kept the service in control of its proposals. But the string
of failures suggested the need for a different approach.
While previous efforts had been unsuccessful, they had generated public engagement and
a range of internal and stakeholder ideas about the shape of reform. Reform leaders wanted to
build on that existing expertise and engagement, this time by engaging the broad community up
front around the question of reform, rather than around a specific proposal. Despite the perceived
urgency for reform, the regulatory reform team proposed a multiyear engagement process to
45
As another example of how science assessment is embedded in the Forest Service, the Forest and
Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 requires the service to conduct periodic reporting
on the status of federal lands’ natural resources.
46 Future of America’s Forests and Rangelands, Forest Service 2010 Resources Planning Act Assessment,
USDA, Rep. WO 87, August 2012, 176.
47 Ibid.
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develop and vet proposals. A collaborative process was put into play designed to “tap the talent”
(scientific and managerial) inside the service, achieve agreement between political and career
agency management, and get broad input and ownership from the public and stakeholders. The
process was meant to develop reform proposals iteratively, with ideas—and in principle,
consensus—emerging not from the service as a fait accompli, but from the broad dialogue. There
was some political risk associated with this strategy, as the service ceded control of the dialogue.
But the gamble was that the process would lead to better ideas, reduce political opposition on the
Hill and elsewhere, and lead to reforms more likely to be effectively implemented in future.
One choice was not to develop proposals via a Federal Advisory Committee.48 The
Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) establishes rules governing external input federal
decisionmaking, in large part to make advice more publicly available (P.L. 92-463). However,
reform leaders worried the FACA approach would be too administratively unwieldy and timeconsuming given its procedural requirements. Also, they felt that a FACA committee was too
narrow an approach to soliciting input during the upfront public engagement process. The service
embraced the transparent spirit of FACA but decided on a broader input process for this early
phase of engagement.
The agency put in place an extensive public engagement process, beginning with a public
Science Forum in 2010 to emphasize its desire for sound science underpinnings to any reform.
The forum began to connect national and local stakeholders and forest managers around forest
science, monitoring, and management developments, including the idea that “providing
ecosystem services may be the future focus of national forests” (FS 2010, 17). The service also
hired a third party to conduct and publicly report on independent science reviews of the rule.49
Between 2010 and 2011 the service solicited independent review of the science
underpinning the rule. A third party received, synthesized, and made public these independent
reviews and facilitated several national and 40 regional round tables to get public input prior to
developing the proposed rule.50 Sixteen consultation meetings with designated tribal leaders were
also held. More than 3,000 members of the public contributed to these discussions.51 For the first
48
A FACA committee was subsequently established to guide implementation of the reforms (see below).
“In keeping with our open and transparent process, the Agency committed to make the reviews in their
entirety public and did so within 3 business days of receiving them.” Federal Register, 21181.
50 http://www.merid.org/en/Content/Projects/Forest_Service_Planning_Rule.aspx.
51 Federal Register, 21164.
49
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time, the agency used social media for outreach to even more people and to seek ideas from an
even larger pool of people than were engaged in the past. (During the proposed regulation‘s
comment period, dozens of additional public forums were held and more than 300,000 comments
received.)52 In its record of decision, the service concluded that the public engagement effort was
“the most extensive, transparent, and participatory process ever used to develop a planning
rule.”53
Leaders of the effort credit the iterative, collaborative, public approach with contributing
to the final shape of the rule and minimizing opposition to the proposed reforms. There was, in
the end, relatively little political or interest group pushback (though the rule was litigated,
unsuccessfully).54 In the view of reform effort leaders, the upfront investment in broad public
engagement and the service’s receptivity to issues raised significantly reduced political and legal
opposition to the reforms.
One of the motivations for the collaborative process was to avoid “end runs” where a
stakeholder group would go to either Congress or the administration to intervene in a less
transparent way that could then open the door to legal challenge on procedural grounds. Another
motivation for early collective engagement was for stakeholders to hear other stakeholders’ ideas
and concerns. In part, this generated public sensitivity to the diversity of views being brought to
the service’s deliberations. Also, it was hoped that engagement among stakeholders would
identify common challenges or issues for consideration by the service. While there was some
initial concern in the traditional extractive sectors (timber, grazing, mining) and the
environmental community about whether the door was being opened to competing interests, the
transparency of, and their engagement in, the proposal process helped mollify those concerns.
Internal efforts to build consensus were also important, with the reform team leading
preproposal efforts to get feedback from field and regional managers and the science and
research staff. To develop internal credibility, and with the final proposal in hand, 100 staffers
from diverse positions in the service were briefed and then asked, in turn, to brief 20 of their own
colleagues on the rationale and implications of the reformed rule. Also important internally were
52
Ibid., 21165.
Ibid., 21179.
54 For example, see Federal Forest Resource Coalition et al. v. Vilsack et al., US District Court for the
District of Columbia, case number 1:12-cv-01333.
53
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efforts to get early legal review and input from USDA’s Office of General Counsel and the
Department of Justice in order to avoid future legal challenges and implementation problems.55
Being Ready to Implement
One of the service’s goals was to be ready for implementation as quickly as possible.
Immediately on publication of the final rule, the service began the process of developing “draft
planning directives.” These directives, part of the Forest Service Manual and Handbook, give
more detailed guidance and interpretation to forest managers than the rule itself. For the draft
directives, the Service received more than 16,000 public comments.
As noted earlier, the service did not use a FACA committee as the structure for public
engagement in the early phases of the rule’s development. However, a FACA committee was
established to provide feedback from a diverse group of stakeholders to the planning directives
and others aspects of the rule’s implementation. The FACA is a more formal approach to input
than the earlier outreach efforts but was composed to represent the diversity of interests revealed
in the early process, including representatives from the extractive commercial sector, private
landowner interests, tribes, state and local governments, hunting and recreational groups,
academia, the general public, and environmental organizations. Final planning directives,
including those governing ecosystem services analysis, collaborations, and management, became
effective in early 2015.56
The agency’s overall implementation strategy was to have in place “early adopter
forests”—in anticipation of the rule’s promulgation—that could test approaches and engage the
public and planners in the new rule (including the ecosystem services analysis required). In 2012
seven national forests began revising their management plans in compliance with the new rule.
Analyses and management plan revisions from these efforts are already available (Collins et al.
2014). The early adopter forests were charged with incorporating the intent of the new rule into
their plans and provided initial insight into implementation of ecosystem services analysis,
including consideration of the following:
Legal issues included making sure the proposal met NEPA’s environmental review requirements and
whether the new ecosystem services provisions in any way violated the NFMA or MUSYA.
56 Land Management Planning Handbook, Forest Service Handbook, 1909.12.
55
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 key ecosystem services contributions by the plan area;
 geographic scale at which the plan area contributes to ecosystem services (e.g.,
watersheds, counties, regional markets, or ecoregions);
 the condition and trend of key ecosystem services;
 drivers of demand for and availability of the services;
 the stability or resiliency of the ecosystems (or their key characteristics) that maintain the
services; and
 the influence of non-FS lands or conditions beyond the authority of the Forest Service on
the plan area’s capacity to provide ecosystem services.
It deserves emphasis that forest managers have the discretion to address these goals in a wide
variety of ways. However, NEPA environmental impact statements and the new directives
require documentation of whatever approach is taken to analysis of management alternatives and
trade-offs (Collins et al. 2014). For analyses emerging from these early adopter forests, see
Whitall et al. (2014), Smith (2014), Smith et al. (2011), and Foley et al. (2014).
Finally, the agency developed an ecosystem services evaluation framework to provide
guidance and documentation to planners on specifically how to conduct an evaluation and trade
off analyses of ecosystem services (Miller et al. 2014). The framework continues to evolve as
national forests learn from implementing the new Planning Rule.
Evaluation of the 2012 FPR’s impact on Forest Service management must wait, as its
effects on environmental and social outcomes emerge over the coming years. Implementation
issues surely remain (Presnall et al. 2015). However, from an institutional standpoint, the FPR is
a significant win for advocates of ecosystem services analysis-based management. With the force
of regulation and administrative directives, the rule stimulates ecosystem services science and
landscape-scale analysis, encourages collaborative engagements to connect community wellbeing to forests’ ecological conditions, and provides a framework to illuminate and resolve tradeoffs among forests’ diverse public benefits. Directly applicable to the US forest system’s 190M
acres, and with out-of-boundary implications for millions of additional public and private acres,
the FPR is poised to have a significant impact on the nation’s natural resources. As a federal
achievement, the FPR is the crown jewel of the ecosystem services movement.
In addition to the Planning Rule, the USFS has expanded its efforts administratively on
ecosystem services to more deeply embed the idea in agency operations. A National Ecosystem
Services Strategy Team (NESST), consisting of top agency senior executives, was also
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established “to collaboratively develop national strategy and policy around ecosystem services
and integrate it into all Forest Service programs and operations” (Deal et al. 2014).
6. Conclusion
The embrace of ecosystem services ideas, language, and analysis is apparent across a
wide range of federal programs. But the 2008 Farm Bill and 2012 FPR are distinctive because
they demonstrate that ecosystem services analysis and management can clear the significant
political, legal, and institutional hurdles associated with national legislation and regulatory
reform.
The success of the two efforts can be explained in part by the commonsense attraction of
the ecosystem services idea: it helps tie community well-being to natural resource management,
articulates the way natural systems—across broad landscapes—generate an array of social
benefits, and can help federal natural resource managers identify and resolve resource conflicts.
Beyond the idea’s intellectual appeal, though, the two stories reveal other reasons for the
initiatives’ success. Both received sustained attention and leadership from the highest levels of
USDA and the Forest Service. This involved not only leadership of the proposals themselves, but
also, earlier on, support for the strategic and scientific brainstorming that ultimately underpinned
the proposals. And while top-down leadership was certainly important, leadership actively
encouraged and exploited input, creativity, and learning from all organizational levels.
The science of ecosystem services was front and center in both initiatives. And both
initiatives illustrated how that science was perceived to matter to policy and management. For
the Farm Bill, the science of how environmental market transactions would be defined and
monitored lay at the heart of the OEM’s mission. And earlier commitment to the science
underpinned USDA’s argument that it would be a natural home for a federal environmental
markets initiative. For the FPR, ecosystem services science provided one important bridge
between contemporary ecological thinking and the desire to more effectively connect
stakeholders with forest management.
Finally, both initiatives were notably “outward-looking,” in terms of their cultivation of
and response to external stakeholder interests. In the case of the OEM, this included not only the
typical public engagement around new farm bills, but also the involvement of NGOs, academics,
and businesses advocating and providing technical support to environmental market
development. Within the government, and distinctive, were the OEM’s successful marriage of
Forest Service and NRCS expertise and missions and its role as hub for federal coordination. In
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terms of the FPR, and based on the unhappy lessons of the past, the commitment to extensive
public engagement prior to regulatory proposals contributed to the new rule’s successful
promulgation.
The Forest Service’s century-old science and public engagement culture, so important to
the successes described here, is not necessarily replicable. And future federal ecosystem services
initiatives will inevitably present challenges unique to other agencies’ mandates, missions, and
politics. But the 2008 Farm Bill and 2012 FPR demonstrate an affinity—applicable to numerous
future environmental policy innovations—between ecosystem services thinking, contemporary
ecological science, and participatory resource planning.
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