Habitat Banking for HADD1 and Wetland Compensation – New Partnership Opportunities and Significant Environmental, Economic and Community Benefits

The Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Public Works (NSTPW) has worked with a variety of new partners to develop a ‘habitat banking’ initiative to address regulatory requirements for habitat compensation, simplify future environmental permitting needs, and maximize the environmental, economic and community benefits. This initiative has clear costand time-savings for us (proponents) in both the short and long-term. The larger bankable projects typically yield much higher ecological values than many smaller projects with lower risks for government regulators and the Public. Perhaps the greatest returns for this initiative are the new partnerships that arise and the extremely wide range of benefits that accrue from them. In our approach, habitat banking involves the restoration and enhancement of historic-damaged salt marsh and coastal marine habitat by means of culvert replacement, dyke breaching, shoreline armouring/stabilization and channel dredging. We restore more habitat than is actually required by federal and provincial regulators for a given highway construction or maintenance project and we bank the extra ‘habitat credits’ for use in the future when our work is likely to cause further unavoidable damage to a stream, lake, wetland or coastline. The restored habitat is also well known to be extremely productive fish and wildlife habitat. To date, NSTPW in cooperation with several other partners has developed six habitat banks that will restore over 62 hectares of high value, coastal marine habitat along the Atlantic coast and in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Two of the habitat banks are shared with the Small Craft Harbours Branch of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO-SCH), and promise significant environmental returns, costand time-savings for the funding partners, new research, development and learning opportunities, and communities’ hopes for a bright future. NSTPW highly recommends consideration of this initiative to other transportation agencies and TAC members who need compensation options for damaged fish and wetland habitat.