What Happened
In mid-January, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced an effort to update natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) methods applied to hazardous substance releases under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The revised procedures would allow, in some circumstances, the use of streamlined methods and assessment tools developed largely under the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) to cooperatively assess damages.
SWCA Lens
The tools identified by DOI, including Habitat Equivalency Analysis and Resource Equivalency Analysis, along with the cooperative approach to assessment, are familiar NRDA approaches. As SWCA’s NRDA team describes in our recent publication for the American Petroleum Institute, Evaluation and Comparison of Habitat and Resource Equivalency Analysis (API 2022), these methods can be used to resolve cases efficiently and fairly, provided they are applied with sufficient technical rigor to assure the public that the NRDA process has identified an appropriate type and amount of restoration.
SWCA’s team of biologists, ecologists, toxicologists, and economists has been working together for more than 20 years to help responsible parties (RPs) and potentially responsible parties (PRPs) resolve natural resource damage claims under both OPA and CERCLA.
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