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Accurate Economics To Protect Endangered Species And Their Critical Habitats, Jacob P. Byl
Accurate Economics To Protect Endangered Species And Their Critical Habitats, Jacob P. Byl
Pace Environmental Law Review
Federal agencies currently use a methodology that finds negligible benefits of protecting critical habitat for endangered species, despite the prime real estate that is often involved. The Endangered Species Act already calls for economic analysis, but agencies currently treat it as a meaningless hoop to jump through. Agencies justify this hollow exercise by pointing to the difficulty in quantifying the increment of added protection that comes with critical habitat designation. However, the increment of added protection for critical habitat can be measured using methods already employed by agencies in other environmental analyses. Although the central benefits of critical habitat are …