Biodiversity offsets perform poorly for both people and nature, but better approaches are available

Abstract

Sustainability requires that we restore biodiversity and wider ecosystem services, yet developments such as new housing inevitably cause environmental impacts. Accordingly, developers are increasingly required to resource offset projects, delivering biodiversity or wider environmental net gains. However, analyses of offsets in England show that the large majority are conducted within development sites rather than targeted toward better opportunities for net gains elsewhere. Here, we compare current and alternative approaches to offsetting considering the biodiversity gains, ecosystem service co-benefits, and economic costs they generate. The results confirm that the current practice performs relatively poorly across all criteria. Analysis shows that by incorporating ecological and economic information into the targeting of offsets, they can provide a significant contribution to addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss or deliver substantial ecosystem service co-benefits to disadvantaged communities. The analytical methods and results presented here could support a substantial improvement in the operation and outcomes of biodiversity offsetting globally.