Biodiversity offsets must address the trade-offs between people and nature: Case study and general principles

Abstract

A basic requirement for global sustainability is to halt the ongoing decline in biodiversity and wider ecosystem services, yet infrastructure developments such as new housing inevitably cause environmental impacts. To counteract this, developers are increasingly required to resource projects which offset those impacts, delivering biodiversity or wider environmental net gains1 . However, analysis of offsets in England to date show that the large majority are conducted within development sites rather than being targeted towards far better opportunities for net gain of either biodiversity or ecosystem services elsewhere2 . Here we compare current and alternative approaches to offsetting considering the biodiversity gains, ecosystem service co-benefits and economic costs they generate. Our results confirm that while current practice is better than nothing, it 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.