Biodiversity Offsets Blog

This is a guest post by Ari­adna Chavar­ria, PhD can­di­date at the Uni­ver­sity of Padova, Italy. This com­ment is the expres­sion of the author’s thoughts and expe­ri­ences and 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 Ariadna’s rea­son­ing), please leave a reply below!

The Bio­di­ver­sity and No Net Loss Strat­egy arise aware­ness among Europe to act urgently to halve the bio­di­ver­sity loss and reach restora­tion of at least 15% of Euro­pean degraded ecosys­tems by 2020 (Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, 2011). The strate­gies invite the Mem­ber States to use new instru­ments to achieve NNL of bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem ser­vices as for instance the imple­men­ta­tion of bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting schemes (Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, 2011; Con­way, M., et al., 2013b). Bio­di­ver­sity off­sets are mea­sur­able con­ser­va­tion out­comes of the actions imple­mented to com­pen­sa­tion for unavoid­able bio­di­ver­sity impacts derived from devel­op­ment projects, after con­sid­er­ing the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy (ten Kate, et al., 2004). There­fore, bio­di­ver­sity off­sets are a set of poli­cies reg­u­lated and insti­tu­tion­al­ized to trade Ecosys­tem Ser­vices through stan­dard units, ‘cred­its’, com­monly pro­vided by landown­ers man­ag­ing habi­tats to con­serve spe­cific envi­ron­men­tal assets. The cred­its are reg­u­lated by the envi­ron­men­tal agen­cies ensur­ing the deliv­ery of envi­ron­men­tal assets on the ground to equi­tably com­pen­sate for the impacts of pub­lic and/or pri­vate devel­op­ing per­mit­tees. This market-based mech­a­nism pro­vide a more time-, cost– and ecologically-effective off­set­ting alter­na­tive (Eppink and Wät­zold, 2009; Vais­sière, A. and Lev­rel, H., 2015; van Teef­fee­len, A., et al., 2015), by using economies of scale to finance to sus­tain the long-term man­age­ment of ES exchanged in the bio­di­ver­sity mar­ket. The lack of poli­cies to imple­ment mech­a­nisms financ­ing and reg­u­lat­ing high value nat­ural ecosys­tems inside and out Natura 2000 sites has con­tributed to the deple­tion of the Euro­pean nat­ural cap­i­tal. Con­tinue read­ing →