Malika Virah-Sawmy, Johannes Ebeling and Roslyn Taplin have published a new paper on “Mining and biodiversity offsets: A transparent and science-based approach to measure “no-net-loss” in Journal of Environmental Management (Volume 143, 1 October 2014, Pages 61–70). Read more here and find the abstract copied below.
Abstract Continue reading
This report introduces the Ecosystem Services Review for Impact Assessment (ESR for IA), a six step method to address project impacts and dependencies on ecosystem services as part of the environmental and social impact assessment process. The steps build on assessments routinely conducted by social and environmental practitioners to better reflect the interdependence between project, ecosystems, ecosystem services, and people.
Practitioners seeking more detailed guidance on implementing the ESR for IA can consult the associated Technical Appendix, which will walk them through each step and sub-step using an illustrative case study.
Read more here and find the executive summary copied below. Continue reading
Baptiste Regnery has prepared a PhD study at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris on the application of biodiversity offsets in France in 2013. It is entitled “Les mesures compensatoires pour la biodiversité. Conception et perspectives d’application” (in French language).
For more information you can download the thesis here or find a pdf here and see the abstract below:
Regnery_2013_Les mesures compensatoires pour la biodiversite Continue reading
Ana Villarroya Ballarin has prepared a PhD study focusing on environmental impact assessment and biodiversity offsets in Spain at the faculty of sciences at University of Navarra. The work is entitled “ECOLOGICAL COMPENSATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
ASSESSMENT IN SPAIN: CURRENT PRACTICE AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT” and was already accepted in 2012. For more information see the summary below or contact Ana directly. Continue reading
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 (the latter to prevent to loose information — as we know, that unfortunately every now and then things are being removed from the internet).
This week (September 1–7, 2014) is the first issue of the Biodiversity Offsets Newsweek. This week was characterized by two great new studies: the first is an open access article by Ana Villarroya, Ana Cristina Barros and Joseph Kiesecker on Policy Development for Environmental Licensing and Biodiversity Offsets in Latin America, and the second is the PhD on Biodiversity offset markets by Carlos Ferreira. Furthermore, the Biodiversity Offsets Policy for Major Projects and Framework for Biodiversity Assessment have been launched in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Another interesting find is a project to assess the success of habitat compensation/mitigation schemes by the UK-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
A recent policy brief (October 2014) has been prepared by Sustainable Prosperity on biodiversity offsets in the Canadian context. See the pdf of the policy brief here and the key messages below.
Agenda for Biodiversity Offsets in Canada_Policy brief_Oct 2014 Continue reading
In our very inside, there is a child in each of us which makes that we hardly ever loose our joy of playing. That’s probably why things like the following game usually attract our attention far more than simple words (yes, even academics like to play ;-)).
A new game from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership challenges business to reduce environmental impacts within a budget in a bid to demystify natural capital. That’s a fun way to explore how difficult it is to make the right decisions for our environment (within a budget) and nicely illustrates those those topics that are pressing “heavily” on us: climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss etc. Try it our yourself and play it here. Continue reading
Jussi Laitila, Atte Moilanen and Federico M. Pouzols have published a new paper on “A method for calculating minimum biodiversity offset multipliers accounting for time discounting, additionality, and permanence” in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Read more here and find the abstract copied below.
Abstract
1.Biodiversity offsetting, which means compensation for ecological and environmental damage caused by development activity, has recently been gaining strong political support around the world. One common criticism levelled at offsets is that they exchange certain and almost immediate losses for uncertain future gains. In the case of restoration offsets, gains may be realized after a time delay of decades, and with considerable uncertainty.
2.Here we focus on offset multipliers, which are ratios between damaged and compensated amounts (areas) of biodiversity. Multipliers have the attraction of being an easily understandable way of deciding the amount of offsetting needed. On the other hand, exact values of multipliers are very difficult to compute in practice if at all possible.
3.We introduce a mathematical method for deriving minimum levels for offset multipliers under the assumption that offsetting gains must compensate for the losses (no net loss offsetting). We calculate absolute minimum multipliers that arise from time discounting and delayed emergence of offsetting gains for a one-dimensional measure of biodiversity. Despite the highly simplified model, we show that even the absolute minimum multipliers may easily be quite large, in the order of dozens, and theoretically arbitrarily large, contradicting the relatively low multipliers found in literature and in practice.
4.While our results inform policy makers about realistic minimal offsetting requirements, they also challenge many current policies and show the importance of rigorous models for computing (minimum) offset multipliers. The strength of the presented method is that it requires minimal underlying information. We include a supplementary spreadsheet tool for calculating multipliers to facilitate application.
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 (the latter to prevent to loose information — as we know, that unfortunately every now and then things are being removed from the internet).
This week (September October 6–12, 2014) were the last days of the public consultation of the European Commission on the planned No Net Loss Initiative (see my previous post). For this reason I have prepared a short-run series on the EU No Net Loss consultation laying down some arguments for and against this initiative. Some of the counter arguments are also found in a letter to the European Commission to ditch biodiversity offsetting (see below) which has been prepared by several environmental NGOs who fear that biodiversity offsets could rather weaken than strenghten current environmental protection legislation. Interestingly, a policy brief entitled “Getting Biodiversity Offsets right” was published in Canada, which builds on a recent study of Canadian Conservation Offset Programs. Apart from that, there were some more news on the new Biodiversity Offsetting agreement in South Africa and some offset examples from the US.
This is a guest post on behalf of Moha Haddouch, PES Project national coordinator at UNDP Morocco.
A project on the protection agrobiodiversity in Morocco is seeking help with the organization of three workshops in the scope of payments for ecosystem services, certification and environmental compensation (in French language). The project is entitled Projet EC-SMD « Approche d’Economie Circulaire pour la Conservation de l’Agro-biodiversité dans la région du Souss Massa Draa au Maroc ». For more information see this link or contact Moha Haddouch. Find a short introduction (in French) below.
Introduction
Dans le cadre de la coopération entre le Royaume du Maroc et le PNUD, le projet « Approche d’Economie Circulaire pour la Conservation de l’Agro-biodiversité dans la région du Souss-Massa-Draa au Maroc » a été élaboré en visant la conservation de l’agro-biodiversité dans le Souss Massa Draa (SMD). L’objectif à long terme proposé par ce projet est d’introduire le Payement pour les Services Ecosystémiques (PSE) en tant que mécanisme innovant pour inverser la perte et la dégradation de l’écosystème Arganier. Ceci, en association avec la valorisation (labellisation et commercialisation) de 2 produits de terroir issus de cet écosystème, à savoir l’huile d’Argan et le miel.