Building blocks to effectively assessing the environmental benefits of conservation practices

Excerpt

The Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) has promised to increase our scientific understanding of the environmental effects of conservation practices and to help quantify the environmental benefits conservation programs are producing. As you'll see from this hefty special issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, a great deal of progress is being made toward these objectives.

CEAP is being driven by two important changes in US agricultural conservation policy: (1) a growing emphasis on environmental challenges and (2) a major increase in public funding of USDA conservation programs. These two policy changes create an urgent need to retool conservation practices and programs to meet the environmental challenges and provide taxpayers and policy makers with an accounting of what their investments are producing. We are proud of the role the Soil and Water Conservation Society (SWCS) has played in assisting the development of CEAP. It is important to our members and to the larger conservation community that CEAP succeed.

One of the important first steps of CEAP was the convening of a Blue Ribbon Panel to help design and implement CEAP. The USDA asked SWCS to facilitate an external, policy-level review of CEAP. SWCS accomplished this through the contribution…