The USACE requires mitigation for adverse impacts to waters of the United States, including wetlands, associated with activities regulated under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA) (33 USC 1344 et seq.), and Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 (33 USC 403) that are likely to occur, and that would be of importance to the human or aquatic environment.  The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has defined mitigation to include avoiding impacts, minimizing impacts, rectifying impacts, reducing impacts over time, and compensating for impacts.  For those impacts that remain after all appropriate steps to avoid and minimize adverse impacts have been taken, appropriate and practicable compensatory mitigation is required to offset those remaining unavoidable adverse impacts.

Compensatory mitigation includes restoring, enhancing, creating, and preserving the aquatic system functions that would be lost or impaired due to a USACE-authorized activity.  Compensatory mitigation may be implemented to offset the adverse impacts of one or more USACE-authorized projects within a single consolidated mitigation project.  Consolidated mitigation can be defined as a single, typically large, mitigation project serving to compensate for impacts resulting from multiple projects.  Consolidated mitigation projects may result in greater overall environmental benefit than those achieved with numerous small, individual mitigation projects and are usually more cost-effective to implement.  Consolidated mitigation includes:

Mitigation Banks - Wetland restoration, creation, enhancement, and in exceptional circumstances, preservation, undertaken expressly for the purpose of compensating for unavoidable wetland losses in advance of development actions. 

Mitigation Areas – Wetland mitigation areas are similar, in most respects, to mitigation banks; however, wetland restoration, creation or enhancement is not necessarily performed in advance of the wetland impact.  Instead, the sponsor generally performs it on an “as-needed” basis.