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Volpe Center Highlights

Environmental Stewardship

Letter from the Director | Focus | Safety | Environmental Stewardship | Published and Presented

Interagency Group Releases Ecological Guide to Infrastructure Development (FHWA)

The ecosystem approach defined in Eco-Logical can achieve a range of benefits, including safer, improved infrastructure; improved watershed and ecosystem health; increased connectivity and conservation; efficient project development; and increased transparency.

Over the last several decades, an understanding of how infrastructure—the basic facilities needed for the functioning of a community or society—can negatively impact habitat and ecosystems has grown. Awareness of how to better avoid, minimize, and mitigate these impacts has also matured. However, translating this awareness into action requires a significant change from the traditional project-by-project approach to infrastructure development. To help agencies make this transition to cost-effective infrastructure development that contributes to ecosystem conservation, an interagency team recently released Eco-Logical: An Ecosystem Approach to Developing Infrastructure Projects.

A team comprising representatives of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, National Park Service, NOAA Fisheries, the Volpe Center, and several state departments of transportation worked together to develop this unprecedented guide to cooperative conservation. In support of FHWA, the Volpe Center's Planning and Policy Analysis Division played a key role in facilitating the development of Eco-Logical.

Embodying the intent and principles of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Executive Order 13352 on Facilitation of Cooperative Conservation, Eco-Logical offers a non-prescriptive approach to making infrastructure more sensitive to wildlife and ecosystems through integrated planning, new partnerships, and cooperative conservation. Central to Eco-Logical is the "ecosystem approach," a process for the comprehensive management of land, water, and biotic and abiotic resources that equitably promotes conservation and sustainable use. This approach shifts the federal government's traditional focus on individual agency jurisdiction to the integrated actions of multiple agencies. It finds ways to increase voluntary contributions from all stakeholders, including the public, to a collaboratively developed vision of desired future conditions that incorporates ecological, economic, and social factors. It is applied within a geographic framework defined primarily by ecological, rather than geopolitical, boundaries. Eco-Logical is posted on the Internet at www.environment.fhwa.dot.gov/ecological/eco_index.asp.