EP 1165-2-502
30 Sep 99
(2) Anadromous fishes and other species of plants and animals recognized by Federal law or
treaty, or otherwise considered important by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine
Fisheries Service, or state resource agencies may be considered significant for purposes of
ecosystem restoration. Certain ecosystems or habitats may also be significant and may be specified
in law and regulation, e.g., remnants of old growth ecosystems, wetlands, and bottomland
c. Acceptability. Acceptability is the workability and viability of the alternative plan with
respect to acceptance by Federal, state, tribal and local entities. Public acceptance and
compatibility with existing laws, regulations, and public policies are also considered as part of
acceptability. Recommendations for ecosystem restoration projects should consider and describe
the degrees of acceptability with regard to these different concerns.
d. Completeness. Completeness is the extent to which a given plan provides and accounts for
all necessary investments or other actions needed to ensure the realization of the planned
ecosystem restoration outputs. This may require relating the plan to other types of public or
private plans if these plans are crucial to the outcome of the restoration objective. Real estate,
O&M, monitoring, relationships to relevant initiatives undertaken by others, and sponsorship
considerations must be addressed.
e. Effectiveness. Effectiveness is the extent to which an alternative ecosystem restoration plan
alleviates the specified problems and realizes the specified opportunities. Proposed plans must
restore important ecosystem structure or function to some meaningful degree. Information
concerning uncertainties with regard to the functioning of restoration measures should be
discussed, along with any proposals for monitoring or adaptive management.
f. Efficiency. An ecosystem restoration plan should represent a cost-effective means of
addressing the restoration problem or opportunity. It should be determined that a plan's
restoration outputs cannot be produced more cost effectively by another alternative plan. See
discussion above in paragraph 16.a(1).
g. Reasonableness of Costs. All costs associated with a plan should be considered. Even after
tests of cost effectiveness and incremental cost analyses have been satisfied, decision-makers must
ascertain that the benefits to be realized are really worth the costs. All relevant information
concerning factors described above will be considered, along with information regarding other
comparable projects, and consideration of risk and uncertainty. This will almost always be a
subjective decision and ultimately must rely on experience, and professional judgement.
h. The annual program circular (published by CECW-B) provides guidance on program
requests for Civil Works activities to be included in the President's annual budget. This engineer
circular provides information regarding current Civil Works programming philosophy, and includes
the latest information regarding new directions for environmental programs that will be useful in
decision making.
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