The politics of biodiversity offsetting across time and institutional scales

Abstract

Biodiversity offsetting-actions aimed to produce biodiversity gains to compensate for development impacts-has become an important but controversial instrument of sustainability governance. To understand how this occurred, we conducted a discourse analysis, iteratively applying a qualitative coding system to 197 policy documents produced between 1958 and 2019 across four institutional scales. We show that offsetting has historically been promoted by reformist approaches, which encourage economic growth without consideration of biocultural limits. More recently, those promoting more transformative approaches have reinterpreted offsetting as an instrument to transition towards sustainable economies respectful of planetary boundaries. However, we show that enacting this approach requires major structural governance changes that challenge the dominance of reformist coalitions across scales. Such changes would need to include a commitment by institutions to renounce non-essential projects and avoid damage and for offset stakeholders to become aware of how their contributions become enrolled in the service of specific discourses. Without such changes, offsetting risks structurally encouraging conservationists to produce natures compatible with a status quo development, rather than to advance transformative practices for biocultural diversity.

The disproportionately high value of small patches for biodiversity conservation

“…Small natural habitats such as woodlots, wetlands, and hedgerows play a disproportionate role in biodiversity conservation in human-dominated regions, where the remaining natural habitat is scarce and occurs mainly in small patches (Shafer, 1995;Lindenmayer, 2019). There are millions of such small patches across the Earth (Taubert et al, 2018), and they should be considered an important conservation opportunity for habitat protection (Maxwell et al, 2020), restoration (Fischer et al, 2021), and ecological offsetting (Damiens et al, 2020).…”

Small patches are disproportionately important for biodiversity conservation, despite ecosystem decay

“…To effectively conserve biodiversity, we must apply these goals at the ecoregion level, as different ecoregions house different species. Small patches are often all that remains in many human-dominated ecoregions (51,52), and our results suggest that by protecting these small patches and by restoring su cient habitat to reach total area goals (53,54) we can halt global biodiversity losses.…”

Are corporate biodiversity commitments consistent with delivering ‘nature-positive’ outcomes? A review of ‘nature-positive’ definitions, company progress and challenges

“…With origins in public pollution and wetland trading policies in the USA in the 1970s, 'no net loss' (NNL) or 'net positive impact' (NPI) corporate commitments have expanded in the last two decades (Damiens et al, 2020;de Silva et al, 2019;Rainey et al, 2015). In business contexts, NNL/NPI commitments have typically focused on applying the mitigation hierarchy to direct operational impacts, with many of the foundational concepts implemented and refined in the extractives sector.…”