HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015!

Posted on by
2

Happy New Year 2015
I am wish­ing you all a happy new year both in your pri­vate and pro­fes­sional life! I am very much look­ing for­ward to a promis­ing and excit­ing new year. Together, let’s help to bet­ter under­stand and bring for­ward the con­cept of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets — there is a lot to learn and to discover

I also hope you had a pleas­ant fes­tive sea­son and a good start into the new year! I would also like to thank you for your com­mit­ment and exchange in the past year. Per­son­ally, I have got into con­tact with so many peo­ple who are doing a great job and I have had the plea­sure to learn a lot from your expe­ri­ence and knowledge.

With your help, I will try to con­tinue and grow the bio­di­ver­sity off­sets net­work in 2015!

See also some very sim­pli­fied 2014 site stats here.

Natural Capital Accounting for Business: Guide to selecting an approach — report by the European Business and Biodiversity (B@B) Platform

Posted on by
Reply

Inter-relationships between nat­ural cap­i­tal, ecosys­tem & abi­otic ser­vices, busi­nesses and other cap­i­tals, and envi­ron­men­tal impacts

The Euro­pean Busi­ness and Bio­di­ver­sity (B@B) Plat­form has pub­lished a report enti­tled “B@B Work­stream 1: Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Account­ing for Busi­ness: Guide to select­ing an approach”. The report is the out­come of the work con­ducted on the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Account­ing Work­stream between Novem­ber 2013 and Octo­ber 2014.

The Guide was elab­o­rated by James Spur­geon in coop­er­a­tion with dif­fer­ent mem­bers of the B@B Plat­form. Its objec­tive is to help com­pa­nies under­stand what is meant by NCA for busi­ness and to help them select NCA approaches suit­able for their spe­cific circumstances.

The Guide is accom­pa­nied by a “NCA Decision-matrix Tool” which has been devel­oped as part of this Work­stream. This inter­ac­tive tool links 11 NCA approaches to a series of ques­tions about the com­pa­nies’ inter­con­nec­tions with bio­di­ver­sity and the envi­ron­ment. The objec­tive is to enable the com­pa­nies to iden­tify which approach(es) fits their spe­cific needs. Pro­vi­sional ideas are also pro­vided on poten­tially avail­able guide­lines and tools to help imple­ment any such approaches. Guid­ance on how to use the NCA Decision-matrix Tool is pro­vided in sec­tion 5 of the Guide.

You can down­load the report and the NCA Decision-matrix Tool or find the Pdfs fol­low­ing: Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Account­ing for Business_report and Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Accounting_decision-matrix-tool.

Read more in the exec­u­tive sum­mary below. Con­tinue read­ing →

Biodiversity Offsets Newsweek, December 1–7, 2014

Posted on by
Reply

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, Biodiversity Offsets Newsweekloca­tions 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: Decem­ber 1–17, 2014

This week (Decem­ber 1–7, 2014) another webi­nar took place, orga­nized by the Busi­ness and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set Pro­gram (to ben­e­fit from these great resources and receive infor­ma­tion and invi­ta­tions for upcom­ing webi­nars, you can par­tic­i­pate in BBOP’s Com­mu­nity of Prac­tice). This time, Joe Bull spoke about mov­ing con­ser­va­tion tar­gets and dif­fer­ent bio­di­ver­sity off­set method­olo­gies which he applied to a case study in Uzbek­istan. In an inter­est­ing opin­ion arti­cle, Car­los Fer­reira points out, that the major­ity of con­sumers haven’t heard of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets because few firms use off­sets as a way to man­age their image and show con­sumers that they are environmentally-responsible com­pa­nies (while many com­pa­nies acknowl­edge the poten­tial of off­set­ting). He con­cludes that” the reluc­tance of talk­ing about off­set­ting to con­sumers has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where, in Britain at least, bio­di­ver­sity off­sets are more often than not pub­licly attacked and con­demned as a license to trash”. Related to this, there were some more arti­cles on the endur­ing dis­cus­sion about nat­ural cap­i­tal and the value of bio­di­ver­sity, i.e. with regard to the preser­va­tion of ecosys­tem ser­vices and the under­ly­ing ecol­ogy vs. econ­omy dichotomy. Most inter­est­ingly, a newly devel­oped free, open-source, stand-alone soft­ware tool to cal­cu­late envi­ron­men­tal losses and gains was released. Being part of the work of the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Project, OPAL (Off­set Port­fo­lio Ana­lyzer and Loca­tor) enables users to esti­mate the impacts of devel­op­ment activ­i­ties on ter­res­trial ecosys­tems and sev­eral of the ser­vices they pro­vide, and then to select off­sets to effi­ciently mit­i­gate losses. OPAL tracks how peo­ple are affected by the envi­ron­men­tal impacts of devel­op­ment and mit­i­ga­tion activ­i­ties. The tool is said to be espe­cially use­ful for con­duct­ing rapid assess­ments of mul­ti­ple devel­op­ment projects and off­set options. Fur­ther­more, sev­eral other arti­cles focus on US and Aus­tralian off­set exam­ples and on the con­tro­versy about envi­ron­men­tal restora­tion in general.

 

Con­tinue read­ing →

Insights into Biodiversity Offsetting in Ontario (Canada) — new report by Ontario Nature

Posted on by
Reply

The Cana­dian NGO Ontario Nature has recently released a report enti­tled “Insights into Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set­ting in Ontario”. The report is the out­come of a project on bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting (started in July 2013), which was sup­ported by the Met­calf Foun­da­tion. It presents the insights and results aris­ing from the first year of this project.

The goal of the project is described as follows:

Our pri­mary goal has been to ensure that as bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting moves for­ward in Ontario, it truly ben­e­fits the nat­ural world. Through dis­cus­sions with con­ser­va­tion­ists, farm­ers, indus­try lead­ers, envi­ron­men­tal con­sul­tants, land use plan­ners, aca­d­e­mics, gov­ern­ment staff and Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple, we have aimed to enhance our col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of both the risks and the ben­e­fits so that these can be accounted for ade­quately in bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting projects and policy.

You can read more on Ontario Nature’s bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting project online or con­tact Sarah Hedges at sarahh@ontarionature.org.

You can down­load the report here or find a pdf fol­low­ing: Biodiversity_Offsetting_Ontario Con­tinue read­ing →

OPAL – new free, open-source soft­ware tool to cal­cu­late envi­ron­men­tal losses and gains

Posted on by
1

This month, a newly devel­oped free, open-source, stand-alone soft­ware tool to cal­cu­late envi­ron­men­tal losses and gains was released. Being part of the work of the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Project, OPAL (Off­set Port­fo­lio Ana­lyzer and Loca­tor) enables users to esti­mate the impacts of devel­op­ment activ­i­ties on ter­res­trial ecosys­tems and sev­eral of the ser­vices they pro­vide, and then to select off­sets to effi­ciently mit­i­gate losses. OPAL tracks how peo­ple are affected by the envi­ron­men­tal impacts of devel­op­ment and mit­i­ga­tion activ­i­ties. OPAL is a gen­er­al­ized and flex­i­ble ver­sion of MAFE-T, a tool that Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Project cre­ated to help devel­op­ers and gov­ern­ment agen­cies design mit­i­ga­tion activ­i­ties to meet the require­ments of Colombia’s off­set pol­icy in a socially equi­table way. Now, with OPAL, sim­i­lar analy­ses can be com­pleted in loca­tions out­side of Colom­bia. It thus aims to pro­vide more effec­tive account­ing of the impacts of devel­op­ment projects and offers pos­si­ble reme­dies to the eco­log­i­cal dam­age they cause. The tool is said to be espe­cially use­ful for con­duct­ing rapid assess­ments of mul­ti­ple devel­op­ment projects and off­set options. Find below a brief illus­tra­tion of how OPAL works (if you try it out your­self, I’d appre­ci­ate if you could please leave a com­ment — I haven’t tried it myself, so far) as well as some gen­eral infor­ma­tion. For more infor­ma­tion, please see the offi­cial OPAL web­site or the the brochure (OPAL_Brochure).

OPAL_questions Con­tinue read­ing →

Biodiversity Offsets Newsweek, November 24–30, 2014

Posted on by
Reply

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, Biodiversity Offsets Newsweekloca­tions 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 24–30, 2014

This week (Novem­ber 24–30, 2014) Ontario Nature held a webi­nar on Green­way Plan­ning and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set­ting in Canada, pre­sent­ing the results of a recent project. More news from acad­e­mia included the call for papers for the issue “Respon­si­ble Nat­ural Resource Economies in Africa” (see my pre­vi­ous post), as well as two pub­li­ca­tions on pay­ments for ecosys­tem ser­vices: The first is a book by Josh Bishop and Chloe Hill enti­tled “Global Bio­di­ver­sity Finance. The Case for Inter­na­tional Pay­ments for Ecosys­tem Ser­vices” and the sec­ond is the report of the “Pesmix” work­shop on pay­ments for ecosys­tem ser­vices which was held in Mont­pel­lier (France) in June 2014. The report was issued as no. 2 /2014 in the “Les Cahiers de Bio­div’ 2050” by Mis­sion Economie de la Bio­di­ver­sité and is enti­tled “Du Sud au Nord: regards croisés sur les Paiements pour Ser­vices Envi­ron­nemen­taux » (in French). Fur­ther­more, an off­set project from New Zealand is pre­sented. Inter­est­ing news from Aus­tralia high­light the launch of the Great Vic­to­ria Desert Bio­di­ver­sity Trust (the Trust). The Trust was estab­lished by the Trop­i­cana Joint as part of its off­set strat­egy for the Trop­i­cana Gold Mine in West­ern Aus­tralia. The Trust rep­re­sents a new struc­ture of off­set deliv­ery and oper­ates as a unique part­ner­ship model between indus­try and gov­ern­ment. It is a new envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tive which aims to focus on con­serv­ing and increas­ing knowl­edge of bio­di­ver­sity in the Great Vic­to­ria Desert.

 

Con­tinue read­ing →

Could accountants really solve global problems like climate change, environmental degradation, over population, and pollution? — asks Gleeson-White in her new book “Six Capitals”

Posted on by
Reply

The ques­tion whether accoun­tants “can save the planet” as the sub­ti­tle of the new book by Jane Gleeson-White (“Six Cap­i­tals. The rev­o­lu­tion cap­i­tal­ism has to have — or can accoun­tants save the planet?”) sug­gests, points to the core of the recent dis­cus­sion on nat­ural cap­i­tal vs. com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of nature. It will sure pro­voke even greater dis­cus­sions. And of course, bio­di­ver­sity off­sets are some­where in between this whole dis­cus­sion. As Wil­low Aliento puts it in his very read­able book review:

Some of the mech­a­nisms for mit­i­gat­ing cor­po­rate impact are also called into ques­tions, such as bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting. This, Gleeson-White argues, appears to be a licence to trash one place on the basis you’ll do some­thing in another, an approach that fails to recog­nise the place-based nature of habi­tats and socially impor­tant places.

But, despite this line of argu­men­ta­tion that seems to counter the con­cept of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets in gen­eral, the books gives voice to dif­fer­ent viewpoints:

One of the joys of the book is the wide-ranging research and inter­views Gleeson-White has under­taken. There are some fab­u­lous din­ner table debate starters from peo­ple like George Mon­biot, Bob Massie, banker Pavan Sukhdev and even Keynes him­self, and enough inter­est­ing leads towards fur­ther read­ing, groups worth engag­ing with and peo­ple worth lis­ten­ing to keep any­one inter­ested in the busi­ness of sus­tain­abil­ity feel­ing hopeful.

Gen­eral infor­ma­tion on the book

The book is out since Novem­ber, find some gen­eral infor­ma­tion fol­low­ing and the offi­cial book descrip­tion below. Con­tinue read­ing →

Making Up for Lost Nature? A Critical Review of the International Development of Voluntary Biodiversity Offsets — new paper by Benabou

Posted on by
2

Source: The Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment, http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/12/24104752/5

Sarah Ben­abou has  pub­lished a new paper on “Mak­ing Up for Lost Nature? A Crit­i­cal Review of the Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment of Vol­un­tary Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets” in Envi­ron­ment and Soci­ety: Advances in Research, Vol­ume 5, Num­ber 1, 2014, pp. 103–123(21). You can access the full paper here (pay-walled) and find the abstract copied below.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Biodiversity Offsets Newsweek, November 17–23, 2014

Posted on by
Reply

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, Biodiversity Offsets Newsweekloca­tions 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 17–23, 2014

This week (Novem­ber 17–23, 2014) a mul­ti­tude of news has cov­ered a few very inter­est­ing top­ics. One of these is the IUCN Worlds Park Con­gress (Novem­ber 12–19, 2014). This event takes place every ten years and brings world­wide con­ser­va­tion experts together to share knowl­edge, reflect on progress and set the agenda for pro­tected areas con­ser­va­tion for the com­ing decade. Of course, bio­di­ver­sity off­sets – and their rela­tion to or applic­a­bil­ity in pro­tected areas — were dis­cussed in Syd­ney. Fur­ther­more, this week there were sev­eral off­set related news from the US, namely the new Wet­land Restora­tion Plan announced by the Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources of the state of Wis­con­sin and sev­eral on-the-ground projects. While the gov­ern­ment of the state of Mary­land (US) is likely to deny a large hydropower dam facil­ity, two arti­cles from Aus­tralia focus on approval or exten­sion of two large min­ing projects. Apart from some (almost usual) news from the UK (includ­ing the col­umn of George Mon­biot in which he denounces the crit­i­cal decline of wildlife), a lot more inter­est­ing arti­cles and view­points can be found: First, two arti­cles elab­o­rate on the role of envi­ron­men­tal funds and sec­ond, two exam­ples of cor­po­rate bio­di­ver­sity off­set projects (one from Canada and one from Hun­gary) are to be noted. Finally, despite its lack­ing con­tent, the response by Kar­menu Vella to the con­cerns over bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting in the scope of the recent EU con­sul­ta­tion (Let­ter to the Com­mis­sion regard­ing bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting) has to be men­tioned. Other news include the pub­li­ca­tion of the report “B@B Work­stream 1: Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Account­ing for Busi­ness: Guide to select­ing an approach” by the Euro­pean Commission.

  Con­tinue read­ing →

Integrating social gains with ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity — a comment by Victoria Griffiths

Posted on by
Reply

This is a guest post by Vic­to­ria Grif­fiths, PhD Stu­dent at Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don (UK). This com­ment 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 Victoria’s rea­son­ing), please leave a reply below!

Land use activ­i­ties may be neg­a­tively impacted by devel­op­ment and off­set­ting activ­i­ties (Photo by VF Griffiths)

Bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting needs to deliver the con­ser­va­tion gains for ‘no net loss’ with­out mak­ing local peo­ple worse off. In prac­ti­cal terms, this means that ben­e­fits pro­vided to local com­mu­ni­ties by both the devel­op­ment and the off­set must be greater than the costs that they endure.

But, with much guid­ance on bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting being focused on eco­log­i­cal aspects and only to a lesser extent on local com­mu­ni­ties and social aspects, are efforts to deliver social gains imple­mented and eval­u­ated in a way that allows us to learn what works?

From my inves­ti­ga­tions so far, it seems that the con­sid­er­a­tion of social impacts (direct and indi­rect) from both devel­op­ment and off­set­ting activ­i­ties needs to be more embed­ded within the off­set process. There also seems to be a need for inclu­sion of social impacts into assess­ment of the out­comes of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. Bio­di­ver­sity based off­set activ­i­ties could ben­e­fit both bio­di­ver­sity and local com­mu­ni­ties, but the ques­tion is how can this be achieved practically?

I am in the early plan­ning stages of my PhD at Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don, look­ing at the most effec­tive ways to inte­grate no net loss of bio­di­ver­sity, the con­cept that under­pins bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting, with social gains. I will be using Uganda as a case study. Con­tinue read­ing →