Biodiversity Offsets for Ecosystem Services — new discussion on LinkedIn

Lau­rence Barea has started a new dis­cus­sion in the BBOP NO Net Loss Dis­cus­sion Group on LinkedIn. The focus is on Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets for Ecosys­tem Services.

The New Zealand Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion is inter­ested in exam­ples where off­sets have been aimed specif­i­cally at ecosys­tem ser­vices, or where ES has been an explicit com­po­nent of NNL. If you can share any exam­ples that would be appreciated.

Con­tinue read­ing

Nature is not for sale! 2nd Forum on the Natural Commons on 2 June 2014 at the Regent’s Park Hub, London

 Counter event to the No Net Loss Con­fer­ence: 2nd Forum on the Nat­ural Com­mons on 2 June 2014 in London

Crit­ics of Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets have a grow­ing lobby, espe­cially in the UK, where the gov­ern­ment seems to rush want­ing to push through the con­cept of Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets, no mat­ter at what expense and qual­ity. As a result a num­ber of bio­di­ver­sity off­set pilots that have been tri­aled are fac­ing severe crit­i­cism and resis­tance, mostly by the local pop­u­la­tion and NGOs such as FERN. As a result, a strong oppo­si­tion against Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets has been formed.

So, not sur­pris­ingly, oppo­nents against Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets have also seen the No Net Loss Con­fer­ence in the Lon­don Zoo (see my pre­vi­ous post “BBOP holds first No Net Loss Con­fer­ence on Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets, June, 3 – 4, 2014, Lon­don”: http://www.biodiversityoffsets.net/bbop-holds-first-no-net-loss-conference-biodiversity-offsets/) crit­i­cally and have organ­ised a counter event on the eve of the con­fer­ence:  Nature is not for sale! 2nd Forum on the Nat­ural Com­mons on 2 June 2014 at the Regent’s Park Hub, London.

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George Monbiot’s criticism on Biodiversity Offsets and the Natural Capital Agenda: “The pricing of Everything”

Crit­i­cism on the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Agenda and Bio­di­ver­sity Offsets

George Mon­biot has pre­sented a detailed (how­ever mostly neg­a­tive) analy­sis of his crit­i­cism on the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Agenda (in the UK) includ­ing Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets as one part of it at his annual lec­ture at the Sheffield Polit­i­cal Econ­omy Research Insti­tute. The tran­script of his speech was pub­lished in his weekly col­umn for The Guardian (see below). I will cite some of the main points of his reasoning.

Argu­ments against the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Agenda and Bio­di­ver­sity Offsets

Mon­biot gives the fol­low­ing four argu­ments (with ris­ing sig­nif­i­cance) against what he calls the “Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Agenda” under­pinned with dif­fer­ent exam­ples, one of them being bio­di­ver­sity offsets.

  1. pric­ing nature is non­sense because the num­bers are not reliable
  2. Unbundling ecosys­tem ser­vices and trad­ing them sep­a­rately means dam­ag­ing the holis­tic sys­tem of nature
  3. the power of the eco­nomic sys­tem as a whole against the power of nature
  4. Prob­lem of val­ues and fram­ing: tak­ing the posi­tion of the oppo­nent (the mon­eti­sa­tion of nature) means loos­ing the own val­ues (instrin­sic vlaue of nature)

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New PhD study on Biodiversity offsets and the supply chain: “Compensating the biodiversity impacts of land use: Toward ecologically equal exchange in the North–South context”

PhD study on Bio­di­ver­sity Offsets

I am very happy to see more and more very exten­sive and highly valu­able PhD stud­ies emerge in the off­sets field. One of the lat­est is by Michael Cur­ran pre­pared at the ETH Zurich (Switzer­land). The title of his work is “Com­pen­sat­ing the bio­di­ver­sity impacts of land use: Toward eco­log­i­cally equal exchange in the North–South con­text”.
Michael was so kind to share the link to the full text (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39197900/PhD_Curran_Full_Electronic.pdf) and asked me to pass this on. For a brief insight, please find (a part of) the abstract of the the­sis pasted below: Con­tinue read­ing

Integrated Governance: A New Model of Governance for Sustainability — report by UNEP Financial Initiative is out

The Inte­grated Gov­er­nance model is the sys­tem by which com­pa­nies are directed and con­trolled, in which sus­tain­abil­ity issues are inte­grated in a way that ensures value cre­ation for the com­pany and ben­e­fi­cial results for all stake­hold­ers in the long term. The report illus­trates the inad­e­qua­cies of cur­rent cor­po­rate gov­er­nance prac­tices and out­lines three phases that help com­pa­nies move towards Inte­grated Gov­er­nance, lead­ing to a holis­tic inte­gra­tion of sus­tain­abil­ity in their cor­po­rate strategies.

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“Credit stacking” of biodiversity offsets — new discussion on LinkedIn

Dave Poul­ton has started a new dis­cus­sion in the BBOP NO Net Loss Dis­cus­sion Group on LinkedIn. The focus is on expe­ri­ences, approaches and poli­cies or other juris­dic­tion of “Credit Stack­ing”, i.e. the recog­ni­tion of more than one type of envi­ron­men­tal ser­vice credit from a sin­gle project on a sin­gle piece of land.

Here’s the link to the dis­cus­cion (to join the dis­cus­sion you need to become mem­ber of the group):

https://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=5888334000442851330&gid=5078805&goback=.gde_5078805_member_5888196242915237889#commentID_null

Doctrine ERC (Eviter-Reduire-Compenser) — Application of the Mitigation Hierarchy in France

While I know that France has been mak­ing huge efforts to improve impact mit­i­ga­tion and fos­ter bio­di­ver­sity off­sets I just came across some inter­est­ing web­sites by the French Min­istry for the Envi­ron­ment (Min­istère de l’écologie, du développe­ment durable et de l’énergie) — thanks to Bap­tiste Reg­n­ery for point­ing me to it.

In France, a big work has been recently con­ducted by the min­istry which led to the “doc­trine ERC” and the “lignes directrices”.The ERC con­cept, namely Eviter-Reduire-Compenser, can be seen as the “French ver­sion” of the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy (Avoid-Minimize-Compensate). Con­tinue read­ing

No Net Loss Conference Conclusions and Summary are out

No Net Loss conferenceFollow-up sec­tion avail­able on the web­site of the No Net Loss Conference

I have just checked the web­site of the “To No Net Loss of Bio­di­ver­sity and Beyond” Con­fer­ence (Lon­don, 3–4 June 2014). There is now a whole follow-up sec­tion avail­able that I am more than happy to share with you: http://bbop.forest-trends.org/events/no-net-loss/conclusions. This includes Con­tinue read­ing

New article on Mining and Biodiversity Offsets

As announced in the BBOP No Net Loss Dis­cus­sion group Malika Virah-Sawmy has pub­lished an arti­cle on “Min­ing and bio­di­ver­sity off­sets: A trans­par­ent and science-based approach to mea­sure no-net-loss”.

Here’s the link to the arti­cle https://theconversation.com/does-offsetting-work-to-make-up-for-habitat-lost-to-mining-27699

And here’s the link to the dis­cus­cion on LinkedIn (to join the dis­cus­sion you need to become mem­ber of the group)  https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&item=5884940535981961218&type=member&gid=5078805&trk=eml-b2_anet_digest-null-2-null&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=2vgKITE9wqZ6g1

BBOP: Introducing the Business and Biodiversity Offset Program

Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets and BBOP

If you enter “bio­di­ver­sity off­sets” in Google the first results that you obtain are from the Busi­ness and Bio­di­ver­sity Off­set Pro­gram (BBOP). The BBOP plat­form (pro­nounced “bee­bop”) is in place since 2004 and has recently cel­e­brated its 10th anniver­sary. It has engaged busi­ness, NGOs, admin­is­tra­tion and acad­e­mia in devel­op­ing qual­ity stan­dards and pilots for bio­di­ver­sity off­sets worldwide.

It is always worth to check the web­site at http://bbop.forest-trends.org/pages/biodiversity_offsets and espe­cially the library sec­tion at http://bbop.forest-trends.org/documents/. Con­tinue read­ing