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Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances (CCAAs) are voluntary conservation agreements between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) and one or more non-Federal parties. The Service works with its partners to identify threats to candidate species, plan the measures needed to address the threats and conserve these species, identify willing landowners, develop agreements, and design and implement conservation measures and monitor their effectiveness. We will rewrite the CCAA standard to provide clarity on how to prepare and implement such agreements.  In addition the revisions will address confusion regarding the existing CCAA approval requirements (standards) and make the issuance standard for CCAAs more consistent with that for Safe Harbor Agreements.  Making the CCAA standard consistent with the concept of a net benefit will allow a more effective means to determine whether the candidate agreements are sufficient to contribute to not needing to list species. The revisions include a definition of net conservation benefit.  Also the revisions will clarify the level of conservation effort each agreement needs to include in order for the Service to approve an agreement. The revisions will enable us to be more efficient in approving CCAAs.