This is a guest post on behalf of Marie Brown, Senior Policy Analyst for Environmental Defense Society (EDS), specializing in biodiversity policy. The text by Veronika Meduna (from Radio New Zealand National) was based on a radio interview with Marie Brown (see below for the link to the podcast).
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 Marie’s reasoning), please leave a reply below! This post has originally been published by Radio New Zealand National.
Photo: Bryce McQuillan, Source: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/audio/20173787/vanishing-nature
Biodiversity continues to decline in New Zealand and worldwide. One of the methods governments and companies use to mitigate impacts from development projects is the offsetting of biodiversity losses in one area with biodiversity gains in another, but the Environmental Defence Society is calling for stronger national policies to prevent ongoing decline.
EDS policy analyst Marie Brown says the purpose of biodiversity offsets is to address damage to ecosystems in a development context, with the overall aim of no net losses of biological diversity.
“What that amounts to in practice is that a developer agrees to a compensation kind of conservation programme and the nature and scale of that would be broadly equivalent to what’s been lost in the development process.”
Trade-offs are regularly negotiated as part of the resource consent application process under the Resource Management Act, but biodiversity offsets differ in that they aim for no net loss, and ideally even net gain.
Payment can be used as part of the biodiversity offset process, but can be “quite risky because what you’re doing is you’re converting natural capital, which you are going to lose anyway, into financial capital, and the key thing is to make sure it gets converted back again, not just to natural capital but to something that is similar in value”.
Here’s some last minute information on a workshop held by Ontario Nature on wetlands and biodiversity offsets. the workshop will focus on policy gaps and options in light of the Province’s proposed development of a Strategic Plan for Ontario Wetlands.
