Executive Order 13604, March 2012, entitled Improving Performance of Federal Permitting and Review of Infrastructure Projects, promotes development of mitigation strategies to streamline approaches to off-set the impacts of land and water-disturbing activities on federal lands. In November 2015, a Presidential Memorandum on Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment was released that called on the Forest Service and other federal agencies to adopt regulations addressing comprehensive mitigation.

The proposed regulation establishes a framework for developing and implementing a consistent approach to landscape-scale mitigation across the national forests and grasslands. The goal is to provide standardized understanding and interpretation of existing policies, regulations, and statuary authorities and promote consistency in their application. This regulation helps promote a framework that allows the Forest Service to participate in interagency efforts on landscape scale mitigation across property boundaries, including compensatory mitigation, and to accomplish these goals both internally and by working with public and private partners. Examples of potential opportunities that the proposed regulation could facilitate include addressing loss of riparian habitat due to development through restoration of other damaged riparian areas or locating forest restoration activities on National Forest System (NFS) lands in response to forest loss sustained on non-NFS lands through other state or federal permitting processes.