A review of corporate goals of No Net Loss and Net Positive Impact on biodiversity — paper by Rainey et al

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Hugo  Rainey, Edward  Pol­lard, Guy Dut­son, Jonathan M. Ekstrom, Suzanne Liv­ing­stone, Helen Tem­ple and John Pil­grim have pub­lished a paper enti­tled “A review of cor­po­rate goals of No Net Loss and Net Pos­i­tive Impact on bio­di­ver­sity” in Oryx. The Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Con­ser­va­tion (May 2014). You can access the full paper here (pay-walled) and find the abstract copied below.

Abstract

Increased recog­ni­tion of the busi­ness case for man­ag­ing cor­po­rate impacts on the envi­ron­ment has helped drive increas­ingly detailed and quan­ti­fied cor­po­rate envi­ron­men­tal goals. Fore­most among these are goals of no net loss (NNL) and net pos­i­tive impact (NPI). We assess the scale and growth of such cor­po­rate goals. Since the first pub­lic, company-wide NNL/NPI goal in 2001, 32 com­pa­nies have set sim­i­lar goals, of which 18 specif­i­cally include bio­di­ver­sity. Min­ing com­pa­nies have set the most NNL/NPI goals, and the major­ity of those that include bio­di­ver­sity, despite the gen­er­ally lower total global impact of the min­ing indus­try on bio­di­ver­sity com­pared to the agri­cul­ture or forestry indus­tries. This could be linked to the min­ing industry’s greater par­tic­i­pa­tion in best prac­tice bod­ies, high-profile impacts, and higher profit mar­gins per area of impact. The detail and qual­ity of present goals vary widely. We exam­ined spe­cific NNL/NPI goals and assessed the extent to which their key com­po­nents were likely to increase the effec­tive­ness of these goals in ben­e­fit­ing bio­di­ver­sity and man­ag­ing busi­ness risk. Nonethe­less, out­comes are more impor­tant than goals, and we urge con­ser­va­tion­ists to work with com­pa­nies to both sup­port and mon­i­tor their efforts to achieve increas­ingly ambi­tious envi­ron­men­tal goals.

Is there any empirical support for biodiversity offset policy? — paper by Curran, Hellweg and Beck

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Michael Cur­ran, Ste­fanie Hell­weg and Jan Beck haves pub­lished a  paper enti­tled “Is there any empir­i­cal sup­port for bio­di­ver­sity off­set pol­icy? in Eco­log­i­cal Appli­ca­tions Vol­ume 24, Issue 4 (June 2014)  pp. 617–31. You can access the full paper here (pay-walled) and find the abstract copied below.

Abstract

Bio­di­ver­sity off­sets are seen as a pol­icy mech­a­nism to bal­ance devel­op­ment and con­ser­va­tion goals. Many off­set schemes employ habi­tat restora­tion in one area to recre­ate bio­di­ver­sity value that is destroyed else­where, assum­ing that recov­ery is timely and pre­dictable. Recent research has chal­lenged these assump­tions on the grounds that restora­tion implies long time delays and a low cer­tainty of suc­cess. To inves­ti­gate these asser­tions, and to assess the strength of empir­i­cal sup­port for off­set pol­icy, we used a meta-analytic approach to ana­lyze data from 108 com­par­a­tive stud­ies of sec­ondary growth (SG) and old-growth (OG) habi­tat (a total of 1228 SG sites and 716 OG ref­er­ence sites). We extracted species check­lists and cal­cu­lated stan­dard­ized response ratios for species rich­ness, Fisher’s alpha, Soren­son sim­i­lar­ity, and Morisita-Horn sim­i­lar­ity. We mod­eled diver­sity change with habi­tat age using gen­er­al­ized lin­ear mod­els and multi-model aver­ag­ing, cor­rect­ing for a num­ber of poten­tial explana­tory vari­ables. We tested whether (1) diver­sity of pas­sively and actively restored habi­tat con­verges to OG val­ues over time, (2) active restora­tion sig­nif­i­cantly accel­er­ates this process, and (3) cur­rent off­set poli­cies are appro­pri­ate to the pre­dicted uncer­tain­ties and time lags asso­ci­ated with restora­tion. The results indi­cate that in the best case, species rich­ness con­verges to OG ref­er­ence val­ues within a cen­tury, species sim­i­lar­ity (Soren­son) takes about twice as long, and assem­blage com­po­si­tion (Morisita-Horn) up to an order of mag­ni­tude longer (hun­dreds to thou­sands of years). Active restora­tion sig­nif­i­cantly accel­er­ates the process for all indices, but the inher­ently large time lags, uncer­tainty, and risk of restora­tion fail­ure require off­set ratios that far exceed what is cur­rently applied in prac­tice. Restora­tion off­set pol­icy there­fore leads to a net loss of bio­di­ver­sity, and rep­re­sents an inap­pro­pri­ate use of the oth­er­wise valu­able tool of ecosys­tem restoration.

Biodiversity Offsets in recent discussions in LinkedIn groups

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LinkedIn discussionsI am using LinkedIn not only as a plat­form to con­nect to other peo­ple in my pro­fes­sional field, but also to exchange and dis­cuss cur­rent issues. As a result, all of the posts on the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog are shared as updates among my LinkedIn con­nec­tions and most also posted to the BBOP No Net Loss Dis­cus­sion Group and a cho­sen few to the Bio­di­ver­sity Pro­fes­sion­als Group. For me per­son­ally, this has led to some insight­ful online conversations.

But apart from these ini­ti­ated updates, I am also fol­low­ing inter­est­ing updates of oth­ers. I’d there­for like to share some inter­est­ing top­ics and dis­cus­sions related to bio­di­ver­sity off­sets that I have observed in LinkedIn groups over the past two months. Con­tinue read­ing →

Global Biodiversity Finance. The Case for International Payments for Ecosystem Services — new book by Bishop and Hill

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Joshua Bishop, WWF-Australia and Chloe Hill, Green Econ­omy Tech­ni­cal Advi­sor for WWF Mekong region, Phnom Penh, Cam­bo­dia are the edi­tors of a new book on pay­ments for ecosys­tem ser­vices that has been pub­lished in asso­ci­a­tion with IUCN and UNEP, end of 2014. The book is enti­tled “Global Bio­di­ver­sity Finance. The Case for Inter­na­tional Pay­ments for Ecosys­tem Ser­vices” and includes con­tri­bu­tions from: A. Baranzini, N. Bertrand, J. Bishop, B. Borges, P. Cov­ell, S. Engel, A.-K. Faust, L.A. Gal­lagher, C. Hill, D. Huber­man, K. Karousakis, T. Koell­ner, M. Lehmann, A. Lukasiewicz, D. Miller, B. Nor­man, J. Olan­der, W. Proc­tor, F. Sheng, F. Vorhies, S. Waage, T. Wün­scher, R.T. Zuehlke, S. Zwick.

Find more infor­ma­tion on the book and where to order here and a sum­mary and table of con­tents copied below.

Con­tinue read­ing →

What are your ideas for new polls on the Biodiversity Offsets Blog?

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Ideas for new pollsAs a reg­u­lar or occa­sional vis­i­tor to the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog, you have cer­tainly noticed (and hope­fully par­tic­i­pated in) the brief one-question mul­ti­ple choice online poll included in the top right side­bar (this time it’s two ques­tions to be exact). As the poll has slowed down a lit­tle and a fair num­ber of peo­ple have voted, I have decided to close this poll, once 100 par­tic­i­pants are reached. I intend to start a new poll then and am look­ing for­ward to your ideas and wishes.

What question(s) would you like to be addressed by off­set experts from all over the world?

I think that is a great oppor­tu­nity, though I admit that ques­tions need to be rather sim­ple and for­mu­lated as closed ques­tions (with a num­ber of answers to choose from). Look­ing for­ward to your contributions !

To enable access to and exchange on pre­vi­ous polls I will also cre­ate a poll archive.

Technical conditions for positive outcomes from biodiversity offsets. An input paper for the IUCN Technical Study Group on Biodiversity Offsets

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Recently, the IUCN Tech­ni­cal Study Group on Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets has pub­lished some new resources (see also my pre­vi­ous posts  Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Tech­ni­cal Study Paper and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets: Pol­icy options for gov­ern­ments). Thanks to Patrick at the BBOP Sec­re­tariat for shar­ing this use­ful information

The present report on tech­ni­cal con­di­tions for pos­i­tive out­comes from bio­di­ver­sity off­sets was writ­ten by J. D. Pil­grim and J. M. M. Ekstrom of The Bio­di­ver­sity Consultancy.

You can access the paper online (in the BBOP Library sec­tion) or find the pdf fol­low­ing: Tech­ni­cal con­di­tions for pos­i­tive out­comes from bio­di­ver­sity offsets

Find below a short intro­duc­tion, the key ques­tions addressed by the authors as well as their gen­eral conclusions.

Intro­duc­tion to the paper

We assess the con­di­tions under which bio­di­ver­sity off­sets may: (i) pro­vide the best out­comes for bio­di­ver­sity; and (ii) achieve no net loss. Here, we con­sider ̳bio­di­ver­sity offsets‘as mea­sur­able con­ser­va­tion out­comes result­ing from actions designed to com­pen­sate for sig­nif­i­cant resid­ual adverse bio­di­ver­sity impacts aris­ing from project devel­op­ment after other appro­pri­ate pre­ven­tion and mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures have been taken (BBOP, 2012a). The goal of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets is to achieve no net loss (or net gain) in bio­di­ver­sity. ̳No net loss‘ is a goal in which resid­ual impacts on bio­di­ver­sity (after other mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures have been taken) do not exceed the gains from off­sets. Impor­tantly, no net loss has no uni­ver­sal def­i­n­i­tion: it can have vary­ing def­i­n­i­tions depen­dent on what bio­di­ver­sity and human pref­er­ences are accounted for, and how they are accounted for. For exam­ple, no net loss goals may vary in terms of spa­tial scales, bio­di­ver­sity that is included, or whether they include only ̳like-for-like‘ exchanges (e.g. replac­ing a hectare of house mouse habi­tat with a hectare of house mouse habi­tat) or also̳ trad­ing up (e.g. replac­ing a hectare of house mouse habi­tat with a hectare of panda habitat)

Con­tinue read­ing →

Biodiversity Offsets: Policy options for governments. An input paper for the IUCN Technical Study Group on Biodiversity Offsets

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Recently, the IUCN Tech­ni­cal Study Group on Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets has pub­lished some new resources (see also my pre­vi­ous post: Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Tech­ni­cal Study Paper). Thanks to Patrick at the BBOP Sec­re­tariat for shar­ing this use­ful information

The present report on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets pol­icy options for gov­ern­ments was writ­ten by Kerry ten Kate, Direc­tor of the Bio­di­ver­sity Ini­tia­tive and of BBOP at For­est Trends, and Michael Crowe, an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant in Vic­to­ria, Australia.

The pur­pose of this paper is to con­tribute to the con­sid­er­a­tion of pol­icy options by the IUCN Tech­ni­cal Study Group on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets and the sub­se­quent Work­ing Group, and to pro­vide infor­ma­tion more broadly to gov­ern­ments and their advi­sors. It is intended as a basic intro­duc­tion to pol­icy on No Net Loss (NNL) or a Net Gain of (NG) of bio­di­ver­sity, and bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. Dis­cus­sions of tech­ni­cal issues are explored in more depth in the com­pan­ion piece (Pil­grim and Ekstrom, 2014). This paper reviews cur­rent infor­ma­tion, but evi­dence is lack­ing as to the extent to which NNL/NG and off­set poli­cies are achiev­ing their goals or con­tribut­ing to bet­ter bio­di­ver­sity out­comes in the juris­dic­tions where they exist. Bear­ing in mind these lim­i­ta­tions, this paper aims to iden­tify pol­icy options at a gen­eral level in the antic­i­pa­tion of sub­se­quent dis­cus­sion and more evidence

You can access the paper online (in the BBOP Library sec­tion) or find the pdf fol­low­ing: Bio­di­ver­sity offsets_policy options for governments

Find below also the key mes­sages of the paper as for­mu­lated by the authors. Con­tinue read­ing →

Results of the No Net Loss Public Consultation now available online!

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Results of the Consultation on the EU No Net Loss InitiativeAs many have impa­tiently waited for it, I am happy to announce that the results of the Euro­pean Commission’s pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on its planned No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive are pub­lished online on the web­site of the Euro­pean Commission.

The inter­net con­sul­ta­tion was launched on 6 June 2014, ask­ing inter­ested cit­i­zens, pub­lic author­i­ties, busi­ness and NGOs for their views on a future No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive at EU level. Ideas and com­ments were wel­come on how to develop the pol­icy, the scope and the scale of the ini­tia­tive; which dri­vers of bio­di­ver­sity loss and which eco­nomic sec­tors to include; how to tackle the chal­lenges related to off­set­ting and the choice of pol­icy instru­ments to use. The con­sul­ta­tion was closed on the 17 Octo­ber. The Com­mis­sion received 723 replies.

The results of the No Net Loss pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion were grouped into four categories:

Sta­tis­tics: In the sta­tis­tics, only the ‘closed’, mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions are recorded, not the ques­tions with open answers.

Charts: The charts visu­ally present the sta­tis­ti­cal mate­r­ial. They are based only on the ‘closed’ mul­ti­ple choice questions.

Sum­mary Report: The report sum­marises the answers of all ques­tions, i.e. also tak­ing into account the com­ments, expla­na­tions and qual­i­fi­ca­tions given in the open, ‘free text’ ques­tions. As this is the most inter­est­ing part of the analy­sis, I have copied the sum­mary report below. You can also direct­loy retrieve the pdf here: No Net Loss of Bio­di­ver­sity pub­lic consultation

All indi­vid­ual answers: All the answers sent in via the on-line pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion are fully pub­lished here. The name and association/company/organisation of the respon­dents ask­ing to be anony­mous have been deleted. Con­tinue read­ing →

French Assemblée Nationale has decided upon a resolution on the (planned) EU No Net Loss Initiative

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no net loss French resolutionRecently, I got some inter­est­ing news from France: the French Assem­blée Nationale has decided upon a res­o­lu­tion on the (planned) EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive. For more infor­ma­tion see the arti­cle “L’assemblée Nationale pub­lie le rap­port sur l’initiative envis­agée par la Com­mis­sion européenne pour attein­dre l’objectif “Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­sité” (in French).

Obvi­ously, the French Assem­blée nationale has voted for a “propo­si­tion de res­o­lu­tion europeenne sur l’initiative envis­agee par la com­mis­sion europeenne pour attein­dre l’objectif “Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­site” (EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive). But I am not sure what this actu­ally means, seen that the EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive is to be estab­lished in 2015 only and not yet. Please fol­low the link to the Res­o­lu­tion of 14 Novem­ber 2014 of the Assem­blée nationale or see the pdf fol­low­ing: RÉSOLUTION EUROPÉENNE sur l’initiative envis­agée par la Com­mis­sion européenne pour attein­dre l’objectif Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­sité. Con­tinue read­ing →

Opinion Biodiversity Offsets As Corporate Responsibility: Opportunity Or Paradox? A comment by Carlos Ferreira

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This is a guest post by Car­los Fer­reira, Research Assis­tant in the Cen­ter for Busi­ness in Soci­ety at Coven­try Uni­ver­sity. He can be reached at carlos.ferreira@coventry.ac.uk.

This com­ment has pre­vi­ously been pub­lished on Ecosys­tem Mar­ket­place. It is the expres­sion of the author’s thoughts and expe­ri­ences and as such is acknowl­edged as a fruit­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. If you want to react or clar­ify your own posi­tion (under­pin or dis­prove Car­los’ rea­son­ing), please leave a reply below!

Bio­di­ver­sity off­sets have the poten­tial to imple­ment high qual­ity con­ser­va­tion in the face of encroach­ing devel­op­ment. But, unless it’s under attack, the con­cept remains almost unheard of among con­sumers. This is a big prob­lem, accord­ing to a researcher on the sub­ject who says growth and reg­u­la­tory sup­port depends on pub­lic opin­ion. 
Con­tinue read­ing →