ABSTRACT
The tension between promoting economic development and protecting the environment has deep roots. One way to require that development projects address the costs of environmental impacts is known as mitigation – reducing or compensating for environmental damage from development projects – and dates back to at least 1958. Mitigation first appeared in amendments to the US Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, and initially it was limited to the US Fish and Wildlife Service's non-binding comments on the environmental effects of other federal agency projects. But with the advent of the major US environmental protection laws in the 1970s, the US and many other countries began to use the concept of mitigation to put more serious weight on the environmental side of the scale in attempt to bring economic and environmental goals into better balance. In the US usage, “mitigation” includes reducing the gross or total impacts from a development project. But as the economic costs of reducing environmental impacts became apparent through the 1970s and 1980s, the practice developed of achieving net reductions by allowing impacts to occur, and requiring compensation to offset them.
