A group of more than 45 companies in the energy and transportation sectors, working through the University of Illinois-Chicago, reached an agreement with United States Fish and Wildlife Service for a nationwide Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances for the Monarch Butterfly.  The agreement encourages transportation and energy partners to participate in monarch conservation by providing and maintaining habitat on potentially millions of acres of rights-of-way and associated lands.  Thanks to the monarch agreement, the energy and transportation sectors and countless private landowners will provide habitat for the species along energy and transportation rights-of-way corridors on public and private lands across the country.  Participants will carry out conservation measures to reduce or remove threats to the species and create and maintain habitat annually. Although this agreement specifically focuses on monarch habitat, the conservation measures will also benefit several other species, especially pollinating insects.

The main provisions of the CCAA focused on conservation practices on easement lands, including a right-of-way holder's obligation to provide notice and to obtain landowner consent, can be found on these three pages of the agreement.  The full CCAA, along with other resources, can be found on the USFWS website.  If you are contacted by an easement holder to enroll your easement lands in the CCAA, please reach out to the KFB Legal Foundation to learn more about your rights and responsibilities before signing any agreement.

For more information from Farm Bureau about the CCAA, click here to read an article prepared by AFBF and a coalition of state Farm Bureaus.