In March 2018, we released a paper on “Coordination in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment Process: General Tools and Mechanisms,” which surveyed some of the general tools and mechanisms available to the Deepwater Horizon natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) trustees to help coordinate their activities. This paper builds on that work: it describes some additional tools that are available during project planning and selection that could help coordinate the trustees’ activities internally within the NRDA program and with external entities. (Note that when we talk about internal coordination, we largely mean coordination among the various Trustee Implementation Groups (TIGs)).
This paper focuses in particular on (1) project screening criteria; (2) strategic frameworks; and (3) joint restoration planning. We provide some examples of the ways that the trustees are using these tools, but have not attempted to catalogue all of them.