Marine biodiversity offsets: Pragmatic approaches toward better conservation outcomes

Abstract

Increasing exploitation of marine natural resources and expansion of energy infrastructure, shipping, and aquaculture across the oceans are placing increased pressure on marine life. Biodiversity offsets, as the last stage of the mitigation hierarchy, provide an opportunity to promote a more sustainable basis for development by addressing residual impacts and achieving "no net loss" for biodiversity. Despite debate around their effectiveness, biodiversity offsets are seeing increasing application on land but remain a rarely used tool in the marine environment. We assess how offsets can be applied in the marine environment to achieve better biodiversity outcomes, and identify implications for conservation policy and practice. For instance, spatial conservation planning provides opportunities to move away from a siloed, project-by-project, approach by pooling offsets on a regional scale. There are real differences between marine and terrestrial environments in relation to ecology, connectivity, data availability, management options, and impact perception, and marine offsets are therefore often regarded as challenging. However, fundamental offset principles, types, and approaches apply equally on land and at sea. Marine biodiversity offset approaches can build on the experience of terrestrial offsets but can also innovate to help achieve biodiversity gains and contribute toward global and national biodiversity targets.

Restoration of Cymodocea nodosa seagrass meadows: efficiency and ecological implications

“…The multilevel approach utilized here, including the assessment of trophic conditions, key-biogeochemical processes (e. g. C cycling), and associated faunal biodiversity, allowed us to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the degree of success of the ecological restoration of seagrass meadows than the standard quantification of shoot density and biomass. Although ecological restoration in terrestrial ecosystems has been well tested and documented (Gann et al 2019;Jacob et al 2020), marine restoration is still in its infancy (France 2016). This work provides a contribution in this perspective, suggesting that marine ecosystem restoration can be effective and conducted routinely although it takes longer than expected, therefore requiring long-term monitoring plans.…”

Designing locally-appropriate conservation incentives for small-scale fishers

“…This helps to validate our methods, which could be applied to pro-actively design and cost other marine PES schemes, and provide the basis for bycatch-neutral seafood supply chains under net outcome policies (Booth, Arlidge, et al, 2021;CBD, 2020;Jacob et al, 2020).…”

“…This may be particularly important as growing adoption of net-outcome approaches to marine biodiversity (e.g. under the CBD post-2020 framework and seafood sustainability strategies) lead to the development of new markets and demand for measurable, additional marine conservation outcomes (Booth, Arlidge, et al, 2021;CBD, 2020;Jacob et al, 2020). Studies such as this could providing the basis for locally-appropriate investment ready schemes for bycatch-neutral seafood supply chains.…”

“…This will require that entities that damage marine biodiversity offset their impacts through measurable. Therefore, a supply of investment-ready marine conservation projects will be needed -which can demonstrate measurable, additional marine conservation outcomes for a given cost -to achieve net outcomes in the marine realm under the CBD's post-2020 strategy (CBD, 2020;Jacob et al, 2020). These projects could be based around performance-based payments to promote pro-conservation behaviour.…”

Impact mitigation in marine and coastal environments: policy challenges and shortfalls

“…Two broad themes emerge as particularly important as a consequence of the research undertaken in this thesis. The first theme is around the challenges of confidently achieving gains that are equivalent to losses and additional, given the type of impacts and data limitations inherent to the marine environment (Bos et al 2014, Jacob et al 2020. A second theme is around the increasingly extensive application of offset policies in the marine environment, whether policies are emerging where risks to marine biodiversity are greatest and whether current policies can adequately apply to marine environments.…”