Ralph Underhill writes: I passionately believe that the planning system needs to do more for wildlife, particularly areas that currently have no protection. However, I do not think “Biodiversity Offsetting” is the right mechanism, even if existing proposals aren’t too bad it is the principle and precedent setting that we should really be worried about. Given the track record of government do we really think that once such a precedent is in place that it will stop there? I feel this is naive and that it will only be a matter of time until the same principle is used to justify damage those sites and species that are protected.
Mark Avery writes: Defra consulted on biodiversity offsetting and is currently assessing what to do next. I hope they do absolutely nothing.
It seems strange that after cutting the size of the Defra civil servant staff and budget, and those of Natural England (for example), this government is introducing legislation for new measures that no-one asked for, no-one wanted and hardly anyone thinks will make a positive difference to our threatened wildlife.
All the enthusiasm for biodiversity off-setting comes from those who are wedded to market solutions to everything, believe that you can put a price on wildlife and then trade it with other commodities, or just think that the environment gets in the way of economic ‘progress’. It is a thoroughly Osborne-ish measure – and therefore not to be trusted.
There are lots of snags with the idea of off-setting – and lots of evidence that those snags have not been overcome elsewhere in the world. Maybe we can do better, but maybe we can’t.
There is a common fallacy in thinking about policy which I believe applies here. It’s the ‘because it might work, it will work’ fallacy. Complicated new policies can usually be made to work but only if all their inherent snags are sorted out. for example, we could have sustainable biofuels – but we don’t. We could have a truly effective entry Level agri-environment scheme in England, but we don’t. And we could have a future biodiversity-offsetting policy, but we probably won’t (I would guess). Public policy formulation is difficult, and governments often get it wrong – often through relying on ideology rather than thinking about effectiveness.
Thinking that biodiversity off-setting will help wildlife is like thinking that you will win money by playing one-armed bandits; it is like assuming that because you might get three cherries lined up in a row then you will get three cherries lined up and you will hit the jackpot.
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I find the proposals alarming and fear that they are an attempt to square a circle. Stated objectives include reducing uncertainty, delays and costs for developers and I am concerned that these will win out over the ‘improvement of the natural environment’. Some of the delays in the planning system (by no means all) are due to the fact that ecological surveys have to be timed in relation to the natural cycles of nature – it’s no good surveying for plants in the middle of winter for example, and there is no easy way round this. Without proper surveys, assessments of distinctiveness and quality risk getting things seriously wrong (area can at least be measured quickly and easily!). The statement in the consultation document that “it has been suggested the pilot metric can be applied to a site in as little as 20 minutes” is extremely alarming and does not give me any confidence that the ecological value of sites would be properly assessed.
On the cost side too I am unconvinced that the proposals will really deliver for nature. The consultation is clear that biodiversity offsets will need to have a lasting value but it is not clear to me how ongoing management costs can be secured whilst at the same time reducing costs on the developer. If we are not careful we could find that the mechanisms to ensure the longevity of compensatory habitats are weak and ineffective when the original site has already been buried under concrete. It is also a concern (admittedly acknowledged in the document) that a single biodiversity-unit ‘metric’ could result in the loss of hard-to-recreate habitats being too often offset by easy-to-create habitats with a long term reduction in some habitats as a result. The document mentions that ancient woodland and limestone pavement would be protected from such an approach but I am not sure that this would cover all the bases.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the government is pushing through changes in the planning system on the basis that it is this system that is holding up development and contributing, for example, to the current shortage of housing. My understanding is that across the country there is large number of planning consents lying dormant and that the real barrier to development has been the lack of economic confidence. Developers will start to build again (to some extent already are) when they are confident they will make their money and when this happens we need robust systems in place to ensure that nature is protected.
A friend of mine once commented about Carbon offset schemes something that works equally well for Biodiversity offset.
‘It’s like giving money to the RSPCA so you can keep kicking your dog.’
We should have no truck with any policy that allows that an already degraded site can be restored at the expense of losing a site worth keeping and it should be kicked into an uncut road verge where it belongs.
Except … it will spawn the opportunities for an infinite number of vanity projects requiring consultancy input until the Sun grows dim and so it is certain to be adopted.
I read an interesting comment in scientific American the other day: about fracking it said (roughly) that it can be done safely and with no adverse environmental effects but that has not happened in the US where poor practise has caused widespread and serious problems. The same almost certainly applies to biodiversity offsetting. So the big question, surely, is the intentions of the advocates: is this a genuine attempt to solve real problems (like where essential infrastructure has to go in one particular place, for example) through a real commitment to replace or better what is lost ? Or is it a cynical gambit to get at otherwise protected land, to be followed by inadequate, poorly executed compensation overseen by yet another toothless, politically manipulated regulator called ‘Off-Bio’ ? Yours to make up your own mind.
The concept of ‘offsetting’ is very flawed. Whether it is possible to ‘offset’ is not the point. The idea that we should be translocating habitats/species because they are in the way of economic growth or perceived human requirements is yet another road which will, ultimately, lead to our extinction.
Who is going to adjudicate over whether x can be recreated at y? Does this happen first or second in the process? Recreating habitat and restoring its complex diversity may take a year but is more likely to take 50-100 years. Mr O probably thinks it is as easy as building a modern house. And we contemplate doing this when all over the planet species from all taxa are facing a huge threat from the sheer overwhelming number of humans?
I was amused to see a letter in the BBC Wildlife mag from the Director of Landscape & Biodiversity at NE who in response to Richard Mabey’s column which called NE ‘an amasculated administrative and PR function’ claimed success in protecting NNR’s, SSSI’s, and delivery of the Environmental Stewardship scheme. Not to say everything NE does is poor but most of it appears to be on the lines of ‘Yes Minister’. Personally I thought Richard M had got it about right. Of course having removed the teeth of NE, Mr O might see them as the natural overseers of an offsetting plan.
If anyone has attempted to respond to the consultation, I’m sure that they will befall the same closed questioning that I did which is likely to result in total frustration and possibly not bothering. It’s written as a done-deal and has fixation with species translocation (expecially great crested newts that are quoted multiple times) rather than protection of complete ecosystems. It’s certainly not very well thought through unless you agree that it’s trying to justify what somebody has already agreed will happen.
I was going to post a comment about biodiversity offsetting here.
But after 20 minutes thought I decided to write something different.
I’ve done that now. You can read it if you wish.
I posted it on somebody else’s blog where it wasn’t very relevant.
I’ve not linked to it because, hey, who needs links?
But it was a good post.
It’s made a worthwhile contribution.
You should thank me.