By: Marianne Darbi

Marianne Darbi — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 10:47:59 +0000

Thanks, Ken, for your thoughts and additional underpinning of my reasoning. From my experience here in Germany I can confirm especially your point on ensuring the perpetuity of offsets, i.e. in the legal discussion even the theoretical possibility that a private offset provider might go bankrupt and the offset is not backed is considered a no go. This has led to constructions where the land is put in public or other non profit trust, e.g. of a public nature conservation foundation. Some might consider this overly bureaucratic, but someone who is well meaning would admit that offsets can’t be simple to be effective, so we’ll probably have to deal with this.

By: Ken Minns

Ken Minns — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 14:04:03 +0000

I agree with much of what Marianne has to say on the subject of biodiversity offsets, indeed natural capital offsets overall but would go further. Nature is not a business, it is a life-support system. I think that ecological offsets are going to have to be and mean the same things to everyone everywhere if we are to keep life on earth sustainable. A key feature of areas which are designated offsets after their creation or restoration is the need to hold them in the public trust permanently, i.e., as long as the losses being offset persist. Offset banking is a good idea but again it should be non-profit and any assets held in the public trust (e.g.,governments, conservancies, public trusts). In other spheres, laissez-faire capitalism has been shown to be wholly insufficient to human needs and, hence, there is little to recommend in the record of commercial banking as a basis for management of natural capital offsetting.

Comments on: Biodiversity offsets are not a business — why I don’t think we’ll have a commercial platform for biodiversity offsets somewhere in Europe, soon

By: Marianne Darbi

By: Ken Minns