Author Alice Kenny writes:  “In the classic US television comedy The Beverly Hillbillies, a poor mountaineer named Jed Clampett strikes oil on his land and must adapt to a new life of luxury.   Audiences chuckled and cheered, and no one questioned for a moment Jed’s right to cash in on his largesse.  After all, it was his land and his luck.”

“So why can’t someone who restores a wetland in hopes of earning ecosystem credits also cash in as a nutrient bank that absorbs pollutants or as a carbon bank that absorbs excess CO2,” she asks. 

Advocates claim that the best way to create incentives to restore the most environmentally valuable properties is to let landowners sell restoration credits garnered from a single location into multiple ecosystem markets. Others say that would be a “double-dip” that benefits the landowner without generating any additional value to the environment.  This was one of the hottest topics at the recent National Mitigation & Ecosystem Banking Conference we attended. 

Via Ecosystem Marketplace Read the Full Article: “Theory and Practice Collide in Efforts to Stack Multiple Ecosystem Values on One Piece of Land”