Current federal requirements to assess polluters for repairing environmental damage will likely be inadequate for the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to a new report to Congress.
The report advised the federal government to take a new approach in documenting the damage, including collecting more data and measuring how people value nature.
The report aims to help officials create the best plan for restoring the Gulf and compensating the public for irreparable damage. BP will have to pay the bill.
"There is no previous case quite like the Gulf oil spill," said Stephen Polasky, an environmental economics professor at the University of Minnesota who worked on the report, released Thursday by the National Academy of Sciences.
He said the massive spill highlighted the need for a new, comprehensive analysis of how people benefit financially, culturally and spiritually from healthy ecosystems.
Such novel research, the report suggests, should be a part of the federal accounting of the damage caused by the spill.
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Scientists hope the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will take their advice, but it is not a requirement.
Since the disaster began in the spring of 2010, federal agencies have been collecting data to assess the damage and will continue to do so for years, as part of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment.
For the assessment, the government follows a legal framework set up in 1990, after the Exxon Valdez tanker collision in Alaska. That spill dumped more than 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.
At the time, no one envisioned a spill as enormous or widespread as the Deepwater Horizon, the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history.
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NOAA officials indicated a willingness to use a traditional approach to the damage assessment, as well as new methods recommended by the scientists.
"We want to address all the potential injuries including ecosystem services and their associated human uses as part of this damage assessment. We also recognize that we will need to plan for longer-term impacts that may show themselves in the future," said Tony Penn, deputy chief of the assessment and restoration division at NOAA, in a prepared statement.
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According to the report, the Gulf is one of the most diverse bodies of water on the planet.
The oil spill also likely touched every part of it — and possibly beyond to the Caribbean and Atlantic — because it is such an interconnected system. Damaging one part — fish eggs and shrimp larvae, for instance — has ripple effects. Fewer larvae and other plankton means fewer fish. Fewer fish means less food for dolphins and other large animals.
Animals within the Gulf also live in different parts of it during their lives. Groupers, for example, live in estuaries as juveniles and move out to the shelf as adults.
Also, scientists said, large parts of the damaged ecosystem — deep sea corals for example — are hard to reach and it may not be possible to restore them.
Scientists writing the report said the assessment should include all the services that Gulf habitats provide for wildlife as well as for people. A wetland, for example, provides habitat for fish, but also flood control and protection from hurricanes.
Scientists suggested the assessment consider the value that people place on Gulf habitats just because they exist. A similar analysis was done after Exxon Valdez.
In addition to its diversity, the Gulf is economically important.
It provides 25 percent of U.S. domestic-caught seafood and nearly $20 billion in tourism revenue annually. The oil extracted from the Gulf also makes up 29 percent of domestic oil production.
Many of those economic benefits were lost during the gusher and continue to be affected. Those losses will also need to be compensated from the perspective of lost value to people, scientists said.
"In any kind of damage assessment case, there is going to be a period between full recovery and when the damage occurred," Polasky said. "How do you make the public whole for lost values?"
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The traditional approach to making the polluter pay for environmental damage caused by oil spills is likely inadequate for the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to a panel of scientists that Congress asked to review the issue.
The panel, made up of more than a dozen scientists from varying fields, said the BP disaster was so large and unprecedented -- and the Gulf of Mexico so complex and economically valuable -- that tallying up individual losses and charging BP for their replacement is too simplistic.
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That work, called a Natural Resources Damage Assessment, is guided by laws set in place after the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska. While the guidelines in place have worked for smaller spills, they need to be expanded for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Most assessments since the Exxon-Valdez ask polluters to repair or replace specific losses, such as a wetland.
Scientists say the approach should also include an assessment of all the services that certain ecosystems provide for the environment as well as for people. For instance, wetlands provide habitat for commercially and ecologically important fish, but they also provide flood control and protection from hurricanes.