The British Ecological Society (BES) in a recent post looks at uncertainty and unanswered questions with regard to biodiversity offsets. The author of the article concludes that since the UK government’s consultation closed at the end of 2013, “the Government has made little progress in finalising and implementing an offsetting policy, with the results of the consultation yet to be published. With the general election just a few weeks away, the decision as to how – or if – biodiversity offsetting is put into practice in England will fall to the next Government […] One of the BES’s key ambitions for the next Parliament is that environmental policy is informed by sound scientific evidence, and that policy-makers have access to the best available ecological science to inform decision-making. How the next Government chooses to take biodiversity offsetting forward will be a key test of this principle.”
You can access the full article online on the websie of the British Ecological society. For more information see some of the “unanswered questions” below.
Unanswered questions
- Improving our understanding of the implications of biodiversity offsetting across a greater range of habitats. Most studies to date have focused on wetlands and grasslands, but this needs to be extended to include habitats such as forests, marine habitats and uplands.
- Understanding the management actions and timescales required to restore sites to functioning ecosystems equivalent to the habitats lost to development.
- Development of a comprehensive framework for treating uncertainty in offsets, for example to inform multipliers and habitat banking.
- An accepted and universal design for biodiversity offsetting schemes that considers the wider context of development, the offset accounting system, and the approach to defining and calculating biodiversity losses and gains.
- A deeper debate on the moral and ethical dimensions of offsetting, examining the social assumptions, implications and values that underpin this approach, and setting it within national, regional and local contexts.
I agree with the aims of the British Ecological Society (BES)in ensuring government and the relative organisations in question to ‘have the best scientific knowledge available upon which to base decision making’. Unfortunately, I believe the complexities of biodiversity food-webs and species distribution make it extremely difficult that humans will be able to ‘model’ environments. The best we can probably obtain is to approximate it and ‘err’ on the ‘safe side’ to ensure ‘no net loss’ and preferably an improvement in biodiversity.
The second point, is that government being ‘what it is’ will likely want to use any scientific ‘endeavour’ as a ‘political football’ and perhaps choose to disregard many aspects ‘put forward’…because the scientific community believes it to be almost impossible to ‘model’ biological diversity. This needs to be ‘discouraged’ by explaining that ‘science has been trying to model the world’ for thousands of years, so it should not be judged ‘too harshly’ if it is unable to model this aspect of the world now.
Regards,
Kevin.
Dear Kevin,
Many thanks for your valuable thoughts. And yes, I (personally) do agree very much with your criticism of black-and-white-painting. While “the best scientific knowledge” may sound idealistic in the best case and an empty catch phrase in the worst, you are quite right that despite the lack in fully understanding biodiversity and its various interrelations, this shouldn’t prevent us from counterbalancing (or at least trying to) the human made impacts. Untouched from this is my firm belief that this should not be marketed as “heroic” or extraordinary in any sense, but as the very least we could do…