Wildlife Innovation and Longevity Driver (WILD) Act: S. 826:
Program Design Options
Overview and Mandated Provisions
The Wildlife Innovation and Longevity Driver (WILD) Act was composed with the aim of improving and maintaining global biodiversity by addressing four critical issues: habitat loss, invasive species, and wildlife poaching/trafficking. The WILD Act addresses these issues through four provisions: 1) establishing the Theodore Roosevelt Genius Prizes, 2) reauthorizing the Multinational Species Conservation Funds (MSCF), 3) amending the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (FWCA), and 4) reauthorizing the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program (PFWP) (S. 826 - WILD Act, 2017). This memo outlines the key unresolved issues within the
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Four of the five reauthorizations of the Multinational Species Conservation Acts extend the timelines of funding, but the Great Apes Act has a new directive to convene a panel of experts to prioritize ape conservation efforts. However, the implementation does not change so the new priorities would be easily integrated into the current program. The Theodore Roosevelt Genius Prizes are completely new entities, but they are created under the Stevenson-Wydler Act of 1980. This act has enacted many prizes previously, so there is a standard implementation that would be followed. The amendment to the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act creates a new directive for all governmental departments that manage invasive species to create a management plan, but leaves the prioritization and implementation of the plans to the discretion of the secretaries. The amendment to the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act leaves the most to the discretion of the administrator, and this report seeks to inform the decisions not specifically …show more content…
This particular program design option fuses both the economics of applying a numerical value to the ecology of the services that the environment provides. However a major criticism of this particular program design option is that it tends to only focus on the quantitative variables that apply to human society, however there are many other qualitative variables such as the sentimental benefits of the environment that cannot be quantified that are missing from the valuation. In this particular program design option, a target habitat will be prioritized based on the analysis that is provided. Different frameworks have different methods of calculating an ecosystem valuation, hence an understanding or development of a method that can be applied to a range of biomes will be imperative. A comparative analysis of this has already been carried out by Pandya et al., where it was found that most ecosystem valuation approaches were useful to explain ecosystem valuation at a macro scale and theoretical level, however relevant local ecosystem valuation services are hindered by data scarcity which negatively impacts the ability to make decisions with regards to local policy development (Pandya et al.,
The question regarding conservation is very much alive today. The United States needs wildlife conservation. And the Federal Department responsible for conservation, the Department of the Interior, are under attack with President Trump's new budget plan. So it’s important to keep pushing for better laws and policies to protect conservation.
Committee on Senate Energy and National Resources Subcommittee on National Parks. 3 June 2003: ESBCO. Mission Viejo Library., Mission Viejo, CA. 31 July 2005. http://web31.epnet.com/citation.
Wood, Paul M., and Laurie Flahr. "Taking Endangered Species Seriously? British Columbia's Species-At-Risk Policies." Canadian Public Policy 30.4 (2004): 381-399. Business Source Complete.
Our system today is inherently opposed to developing a relationship with the land because it depends on evidence in terms of monetary worth. “One basic weakness in a conservationist system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value” (246). How much is a wildflower or a songbird worth? Therefore, this infinitely complex ecological system, which depends upon an unforeseeable amount of community-shaping mechanisms, tends to become increasingly diseased. “It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial values, but that are (as we know) essential to its healthy functioning” (252).
...rupt native species and ecosystem hence making the restoration of both evolutional and ecological potential almost impossible. Whereas Donlan (2005) concluded that re-wilding North American is the best conservation strategy to the African and Asian threatened megafauna, meanwhile re-wilding will restores the evolutionary and ecological potentials in the process. In my point of view, Pleistocene re-wilding must not be implemented simply because the introduced species might fail to adapt to the new environment. High costs and disease outbreak are another challenge that can’t be ignored.
In May 1991, Federal District Judge William Dwyer issued a landmark decision finding that the Forest Service had violated the National Forest Management Act by failing to implement an acceptable management plan for the northern spotted owl. His decision forbade timber sales across the spotted owl region until the Forest Service implemented an acceptable plan. An injunction blocking timber sales in Northern Spotted Owl habitat affected 17 national forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.
In 1987, when the Endangered Species Act was put into practice, the Federal Wildlife Service refused to list the Northern Spotted Owl. The FWS was then sued by the National Audubon Society to list the Species. During this time period, it was discovered that when examining the Northern Spotted Owl for its listing the FWS had looked at both the economics and the politics in ...
Estimates are that at the turn of the twentieth century over two million wild horses roamed free in the western United States. However, having no protection from their primary predator, man, by the 1970’s there numbers had dwindled to less than thirty thousand. In 1971, after a massive public uproar, Congress by a unanimous vote enacted the “Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act” (Act) that characterizes wild horses and burros as national treasures and provides for their protection.
The Endangered Species Act Introduction: Long-term survival of a species depends on its ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions (Murphy, 1994). Genetic diversity within a species, which has taken 3.5 billion years to evolve, makes adaptations to these changing environments possible. Unfortunately, the rate of extinction of genetically diverse organisms is rapidly increasing, thus reducing this needed biodiversity, largely due to the human impacts of development and expansion. What was an average of one extinction per year before is now one extinction per hour and extinct species numbers are expected to reach approximately one million by the year 2000 (WWW site, Bio 65). As a result governmental and societal action must be taken immediately!
Halpern and his team suggest that an EBM approach may be the best solution for addressing these issues. Chuenpagdee’s research also highlights the challenges and issues surrounding the implementation of effective MPAs. The study included an in-depth look into four case studies that focused on the design stages of MPAs, and the social issues that must be taken into consideration, and how the incorporation of local communities into management efforts could lead to increases in MPA network success and sustainability. The compilation of data presented in these studies, all highlight the fact that nations are increasing the number of MPAs, in order to reach international goals of conservation, however even if the global area goals of protection are met, it is clear that the success of these protected areas will be heavily dependent upon the socioeconomic issues surrounding the impacted areas, as well as the larger-scale issues that need to be simultaneously addressed such as pollution and climate change, both of which can not be resolved by the implementation of protected zones.... ...
I would argue that at the very least, there needs to be some form of triage implemented. The way the Endangered Species Act is currently allocating funds is mediocre at best and has many flaws. There is no denying there are limited resources so that makes efficient use of them even more important. Each of the systems of triage outlined in this paper have valid points and problematic components. Elements of each system could be combined into a nicely working plan that recovers the greatest number of species on a limited budget.
Tietenberg, Thomas. Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Addison Wesley: New York, 2003. pp. 561. ISBN 0-201-77027-X, pp. 7-11.
* Daily, Gretchen C., ed. Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997.
Ranganathan, J. et al. (2008). Ecosystem Services a Guide for Decision Makers. World Resources Institute.
Everyone’s all seen those wildlife shows on tv. The shows on National Geographic and such, showing animals in beautiful environments, everything lush and growing and nothing at all wrong that could threaten these creatures and places. But, have anyone seen the other side? The side where all these beautiful creatures and plants starve, are decimated by predators that have never been there before, and sometime even become poisoned by their very own homes and habitats? Of course no one has. That doesn’t mean that its not happening. It is happening, and its happening everywhere. And guess who is to blame? People. Society. Humans as a race pollute the environment, hunt animals simply for their parts, fish way more than humans will ever need just for the sake of money, introduce new species to new places for our own gain, and even purposefully destroy entire regions just for human expansion. And its starting to take its toll. While it is true that nature is constantly in flux and certain species come and go, humans are causing more species to disappear in the past few hundred years then nature has ever caused since the age of the dinosaurs, and therefore it is up to humans to repair the damage caused, be it cleaning the environment and habitats of these creatures, or taking more direct action to protect and preserve the species that are on the brink of extinction.