About the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Newsweek

If you are inter­ested in envi­ron­men­tal com­pen­sa­tion and bio­di­ver­sity off­sets, there are cer­tainly good news: there is now a whole bunch of infor­ma­tion from dif­fer­ent sources, loca­tions and view­points pub­licly avail­able (some­thing which wasn’t this easy only a cou­ple of years ago). Now, as has been pointed out (see here) the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog aims to com­pile and some­what struc­ture this infor­ma­tion. But there is not only a wealth of sources already out there on the inter­net, but also new sources are con­tin­u­ously being added. I am fol­low­ing and col­lect­ing the news via Scoop.it and cover the most trend­ing ones in posts on the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog. Nev­er­the­less, not all news can be cov­ered (at least not yet) and there­fore the “Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Newsweek” will list up the head­lines of the past week, together with the links and PDFs of the arti­cles or news.

This week: Novem­ber 10–16, 2014

This week (Novem­ber 10–16, 2014) was rel­a­tively calm as regards bio­di­ver­sity off­sets news. Per­haps most inter­est­ing to note are two pieces of infor­ma­tion from research. The first is a law student’s research paper on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets under New Zealand’s pri­mary plan­ning leg­is­la­tion – the Resource Man­age­ment Act 1991 (RMA). The paper argues that while the cur­rent approach to off­sets under the RMA is sub-optimal, recent devel­op­ments of the law per­tain­ing to national pol­icy state­ments pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity to use bio­di­ver­sity off­sets as part of imple­ment­ing an envi­ron­men­tal bot­tom line for bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem func­tion loss. The sec­ond is a report enti­tled “Can market-based instru­ments make a dif­fer­ence?” which was elab­o­rated in the scope of the “invalu­able” project. In another arti­cle the Research Coun­cil of Nor­way is encour­ag­ing research activ­i­ties that draw closer con­nec­tions between cli­mate and bio­di­ver­sity. Two other arti­cles are more con­cerned about likely neg­a­tive envi­ron­men­tal impacts: The first claims Russ­ian author­i­ties are pro­ceed­ing with two major con­struc­tion projects in pro­tected areas, despite poten­tial con­se­quences includ­ing UNESCO sanc­tions and deadly wal­rus stam­pedes. The sec­ond arti­cle fears that the UK’s Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set­ting pro­posal is too simplistic.

 

Bio­di­ver­sity off­sets news from Academia

Bio­di­ver­sity off­sets under the Resource Man­age­ment Act 1991: A New Envi­ron­men­tal Bottom-Line? Novem­ber 10, 2014, by Hol­loway, Adam Loth­ian (see also here)

Fill­ing In The Infor­ma­tion Gap On Mar­ket Based Instru­ments For Bio­di­ver­sity Con­ser­va­tion, Novem­ber 11, 2014, by Kelli Barett

Bio­di­ver­sity can off­set cli­mate change, Novem­ber 13, 2014, Research coun­cil of Nor­way, by Lis­bet Jære/Thomas Keil­man. Trans­la­tion: Dar­ren McKellep/Carol B. Eck­mann (see also here and here)

Crit­i­cal dis­cus­sion on bio­di­ver­sity offsets

Rus­sia Plows Ahead With Con­struc­tion at UNESCO Sites, Novem­ber 11, 2014, by Alexej Eremenko

Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set­ting pro­posal too sim­plis­tic — Green Watch­dog warns, Novem­ber 12, 2014, by UK parliament

PDFs of the Articles/Links

To pre­vent to loose infor­ma­tion find the Pdfs of the arti­cles or news below — as we know, that unfor­tu­nately every now and then things are being removed from the internet.

Newsweek 10–16 Novem­ber 2014_Biodiversity can off­set cli­mate change — The Research Coun­cil of Norway

Newsweek 10–16 Novem­ber 2014_Biodiversity Off­sets under the Resource Man­age­ment Act 1991

Newsweek 10–16 Novem­ber 2014_Biodiversity Off­set­ting pro­posal too sim­plis­tic — Green Watch­dog warns

Newsweek 10–16 Novem­ber 2014_Filling In The Infor­ma­tion Gap On Mar­ket Based Instru­ments For Bio­di­ver­sity Conservation

Newsweek 10–16 Novem­ber 2014_Russia Plows Ahead With Con­struc­tion at UNESCO Sites