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- New data has found that natural habitats occupying an area larger than Greece have been created to offset economic developments..
- Called ‘biodiversity offsets’, man-made conservation areas are created to compensate for economic developments and are a growing trend.
- They include major industrial projects like the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in Mongolia and the Bujagali hydropower project in Uganda and at the other end of the scale, grassland restoration offsets only one hectare in size to compensate for housing developments in the UK.
- Until now, no one has had enough information to assess whether they work on an international scale.
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- ten thousand examples of nature sites created specifically to compensate for industrial impacts.
- The researchers found that across the world businesses are offsetting their development at a ‘rapid rate’ – from international corporations to smallscale landowners.
- Biodiversity offsets are being implemented very quickly despite being quite a recent policy idea. More than 153,000 square kilometres is a big chunk of land and—for the first time—we now have a dataset that can and will be used by two hundred countries across the world to refine “no net loss” policies, seeking to protect our natural environment.’
- No Net loss’ policies are the point at which the project-related impacts on biodiversity are balanced by measures taken to avoid and minimize their impacts. .
- emerging economies (particularly in South America) were more dominant in terms of global offsetting and most projects are very small.
- the researchers also note that the overwhelming majority (99.7%) of projects are implemented by law rather than on a voluntary basis.
- The global extent of biodiversity offset implementation under no net loss policies, by Joseph W. Bull and Niels Strange, is published in Nature Sustainability.
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