Managing ledgers for stacked credit trading

Habitat restoration is critical to achieve Endangered Species Act recovery targets, to mitigate for the loss of wetlands, and mitigate for the habitat loss from pollution and other impacts. Unfortunately, there is often not enough grant and public funds to achieve these goals. Many jurisdictions require that mitigation projects be constructed on site and in kind. However, some studies have shown that small mitigation projects that are developed on site and in kind are not resilient and do not achieve their proposed goals. Furthermore, these disparate mitigation projects may not address the largest needs in terms of water quality or for endangered species recovery. Habitat credit trading can sometimes fill these voids. However, large and complex projects and the costs associated with their long-term monitoring, maintenance, and adaptive management can make it difficult to sell enough credits to make them viable. In order to make some of these projects possible, mitigation credit traders try to make the same projects applicable to multiple needs such as wetland mitigation and conservation mitigation. This is possible but trying to maintain the ledgers for multiple banks that overlay the same project can be difficult. This paper demonstrates one possible way to have a number of credit overlays that cover numerous needs over the same project and ensures that portions of the project are not double counted. The key to this methodology is to relate all credits back to acreages. If these type of details can be effectively delineated, more large projects may be feasible which can speed goals for clean water and habitat conservation