National Cattlemen's Beef Association Pushes Back on Bill to Designate Critical Habitat on Priate Lands

The House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman. A Republican from Arkansas has introduced the American Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act, a comprehensive bill covering various initiatives, Public Lands Council Director and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Government Affairs Director Sigrid Johannes highlights specific issues that they are eager to see resolved within this package.

“One of those is in flexibility actually, for privately on spoke we talked a lot about the impact of public lands grazers, but there's also plenty of overreach that happens on private lands under the ESA and one of the portions of this bill that's really significant is that it would codify these agreements that folks often enter into voluntarily called Candidate Conservation Agreements or candidate consequence Conservation Agreements with assurances CCA’s or CCA, as you see a lot of people participating in these ahead of a species listing to try and up the level of voluntary conservation that's happening to try and increase the number of habitat acres on the ground to ultimately try to avoid a listing.”

Cattle producers among others frequently engage in these agreements. However, a frustrating aspect, according to Johannes is that conservation agencies like Fish and Wildlife Conservation can selectively choose which voluntary efforts count towards goals. The bill aims to prevent fish and wildlife agencies from designating critical habitat on private land already participating in a habitat management plan.