Developing Restoration Alternatives. Once injury assessment is complete or nearly complete, trustees develop a plan for restoring the injured natural resources and services. In the NRDA process, trustees identify a reasonable range of restoration alternatives, evaluate and select the preferred alternative(s) and develop a Draft and Final Restoration Plan. Acceptable restoration actions include any of the actions authorized under OPA (and OSPRA): restoration, rehabilitation, replacement acquisition of the equivalent, or some combination of those actions. Restoration actions under OPA regulations are either primary or compensatory. Primary restoration is action taken to return injured natural resources and services to baseline conditions. For primary restoration, the regulations require trustees to consider the natural recovery option. Under this alternative, trustees would take no direct action to restore the injured natural resources and rely on natural processes for recovery. This approach relies on the capacity of ecosystems to “self-heal” and the principal advantages are ease of implementation and cost-effectiveness. Compensatory restoration is action taken to compensate for the interim losses of natural resources and services pending recovery. Each restoration alternative will provide for primary and/or compensatory restoration actions that address one or more specific injuries associated with the incident. Primary restoration actions that speed natural resource and service recovery will reduce the requirement for compensatory restoration. Therefore, the type and scale of compensatory restoration will depend on the nature of the primary restoration action, and the level and rate of recovery of the injured natural resources and services. When identifying compensatory restoration components of the restoration alternatives, trustees must first consider compensatory restoration actions that provide services of the same type as those lost. If compensatory actions of the same type cannot provide a reasonable range of alternatives, trustees then consider other compensatory restoration actions that will provide services comparable to those lost.
