The past meet­ing of the advi­sory group of the Busi­ness and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Pro­gram (BBOP12) which took place in Barcelona Octo­ber 26–27, 2015 is one of the exam­ples of events that I attended and that are great which I feel should get a lit­tle more atten­tion here on the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog, but sadly even­tu­ally hap­pen to get none at all. So, I’ll break the habit at least for now.

This year I found the atmos­phere par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive — and friendly and family-like as always. The first day was split into a num­ber of ses­sions cov­er­ing the most top­i­cal aspects of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. The ses­sions were orga­nized as panel dis­cus­sions which worked really well com­pared to rush­ing through a mul­ti­tude of pre­sen­ta­tions. The big plus was also that prepa­ra­tion efforts were sig­nif­i­cantly reduced (no slides, as I am over­whelmed by work and sat on two pan­els that was just great!) and allow­ing for more open­ness to react and discuss.

The sec­ond day (which I couldn’t stay for) focused on the future of BBOP and which direc­tion to take from here. Per­son­ally, I am of the opin­ion that BBOP has achieved a lot and set strong stan­dards in the field of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets (that have greatly influ­enced the work of oth­ers – if you’re into bio­di­ver­sity off­sets it seems impos­si­ble not to have at least come across BBOP, right?). The Busi­ness and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Pro­gram is now at a cross­roads, but there is a mul­ti­tude of promis­ing options how to fur­ther develop. When I flew back home the sec­ond day of the con­fer­ence I had this nice view on the Alps and had to think that I’d hope there’ll be open skies for BBOP…

I had pre­pared some exten­sive notes to share with you, but unfor­tu­nately they got lost (blame the ipad, the word app or just me…). There­fore, I want to share at least some impres­sions of this event with you (see below). Find also below the infor­ma­tion from the BBOP web­site on the BBOP12 Advi­sory Group meeting.

Infor­ma­tion by BBOP on its annual advi­sory group meeting

This year’s annual BBOP Advi­sory Group meet­ing will take place in Barcelona, 26–27 Octo­ber, at the Sant Pau Recinte Mod­ernista.  The meet­ing aims to:

• Catal­yse agree­ment on prac­ti­cal ways for busi­ness lead­ers, policy-makers, investors and the con­ser­va­tion com­mu­nity to address No Net Loss and Zero Defor­esta­tion, so this gen­er­a­tion can be the first to leave the world’s bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem ser­vices in a bet­ter con­di­tion than that in which we inher­ited it
• Exchange ideas and expe­ri­ence from many coun­tries and indus­try sec­tors on best practice
• Pro­vide advice on the design and imple­men­ta­tion of mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures, off­sets and con­ser­va­tion banks to those who need it.

More infor­ma­tion on the meet­ing can be found here.

Some photo impres­sions of BBOP 12

The awe­some venue in St. Pau Recinte Modernista:

Kerry ten Kate and Michael Jenk­ins open­ing BBOP12:

One of many inter­est­ing panels:

Our co-host of the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment intro­duced to the recent intro­duc­tion of off­set­ting and habi­tat bank­ing in Catalonia: