Comments on: The legal and institutional dimensions of biodiversity offsetting — a workshop report by Megan Evans

By: Marianne Darbi

Marianne Darbi — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 10:36:52 +0000

Love your analysis of the situation in the UK, Derrick! It is frustrating that so much energy is spent debating and campaigning against each other when the best outcome can always be achieved if there is understanding and cooperation among stakeholders…

By: Derrick Wilkinson

Derrick Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 14:32:02 +0000

Very interesting note on your workshop! I was particularly interested to note your remarks about the complexity and challenges of actually securing and managing appropriate site for biodiversity offsetting. The need for multi-stakeholder work to ensure sites are properly developed and managed is crucial to their success. Unfortunately, I’ve found that in the UK there there is often too little understanding or trust amongst many of the stakeholders that need to be involved — hence the unhelpful knee-jerk reaction of some environmentalist that biodiversity offsetting is “a licence to trash”. Perhaps it would help if the development and publication of more work was facilitated that highlights the multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder nature of the issues involved.

By: David Hill

David Hill — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:29:28 +0000

Very useful note on the workshop which resonates with the developing UK system. We still have too much ignorance of the benefits of the system here because commentators have not read all the documentation and still think it is a licence to trash. In fact it is the reverse. In the UK the issue is more about capturing the impacts on relatively low levels of biodiversity from general, but nonetheless, large scale development currently happening (eg 1 million houses currently in the planning system that will create substantial cumulative impacts in the wider countryside yet almost no compensation is currently being secured). Had offsetting been adopted for these it would have provided more investment annually into the natural environment than we currently provide through all our agri-environment schemes (which are anyway, short-term offset funding mechanisms given to farmers for the environmental impacts created by farming). The government, despite being advised and recommended to adopt a mandatory approach through the planning system, is currently only interested in a voluntary approach which makes it difficult to build a market. One county in the UK has adopted a mandatory approach and it is the only area where offsetting is scaling up. It will, over a relatively short time period, provide a massive boost to wildlife habitat in that part of the country and also funding for planning authority ecologists to undertake the metric calculations of all developments in the future. As we get this approach to work, the model is highly likely to scale-up across the country, enabling a transparent mechanism by which planning authorities can deliver their legal biodiversity duties.