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The grey wolf: prominent on ‘endangered’ list. Credit: COREL CORPORATION

The Clinton administration last week formalized its controversial ‘no surprises’ policy under which landowners who take steps to preserve natural habitat are guaranteed that they will not incur additional expense or obligations under species protection laws. Scientists, meanwhile, are pressurizing lawmakers to correct what they see as flaws in the policy.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) allows landowners to ‘take’, or harm, some protected animals or plants in exchange for developing Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs) that improve the species' overall chance of survival. About 225 such plans are already approved and 200 more are planned.

The interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, has pushed HCPs as a way of involving private property owners in species protection, as half of the more than 1,000 species considered at risk of extinction are exclusively on private land. In 1994 he began promising landowners that there would be “no surprises” once an HCP was approved; the plans would be binding, in some cases for as long as 100 years.

Last week the Department of Interior codified ‘no surprises’ as a formal policy. But the policy has been criticized (see Nature 386, 530; 1997) because it does not allow for changing circumstances or new scientific information about an endangered species.

Last month, 17 leading ecologists restated those and other worries in a letter to four senators who have introduced legislation to reauthorize the ESA. The authors propose “a few crucial amendments to make the [bill] more scientifically credible”. They ask for assurances on stable funding for landowner incentive programmes that may require government spending, and for HCPs to be adjusted if they are not working.

They also call for the removal of two provisions from the bill: the requirement for independent scientific review of all listing decisions “even though many such decisions generate little or no scientific controversy”, and the requirement for a detailed economic analysis of recovery measures.

The letter's main authors, Gary Meffe of the University of Florida and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee, were joined by the ecologists Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, Thomas Eisner of Cornell, Peter Raven, and two former presidents of the Ecological Society of America, Ronald Pulliam of the University of Georgia and Gordon Orians of the University of Washington.

Several policy initiatives announced with the ‘no surprises’ regulation suggest that the Interior Department is taking the criticisms seriously. The initiatives call for “expanded use of adaptive management for all HCPs”, the establishment of clear biological goals for the plans, and improved scientific monitoring. The department is also to consider limiting the duration of some HCPs. Draft guidances for these initiatives are expected to be published within the next two weeks.

If the new legislation is to succeed, the trick will be to make the ‘no surprises’ policy flexible while still assuring landowners that they will not be surprised. Debate about ESA re-authorization is at present deadlocked, with both property rights advocates and environmentalists unhappy with the bill introduced by Dirk Kempthorne (Republican, Idaho) and three other senators.