Seeing no net loss: Making nature offset-able

Policies for biodiversity no net loss and net gain underwrite narratives for green growth through advancing reparative logics to ongoing habitat impacts. By enabling offsetting practices that risk accommodating rather than averting land change developments, net principles are said to resemble modes of ‘accumulation by environmental restoration’. Biodiversity net principles are frequently depicted visually as a diagram of the mitigation hierarchy for communicational ease and have proliferated over recent decades despite little evidence for their ecological effectiveness. This paper combines economic sociology, visual media analysis of the net diagram and political ecology to account for the stabilisation of net principles in policy frameworks. It highlights the upstream imaginative work that this visual tool and its wider assemblages perform to support offsetting and habitat banking practices on the ground. The paper positions the NNL diagram as a conceptual and ideational technology. It traces the practices through which biodiversity is rationalised by the Cartesian coordinates of an XY schematic, and en-framed as a measure of numerical value on a vertical scale. The effect is to engender coherence to the idea of netting out differences in aggregate sums of biodiversity unit value, making nature conceptually offset-able. I develop this account through a history of the diagram as well as the broader processes that have shaped the policy and its arrival in English planning frameworks. Observers increasingly question how biodiversity offsetting and no net loss/ net gain have become so popular when their empirical foundations are so weak. This paper proposes that within the wider assemblages of actors, one answer is located in the potency and mobility of conceptual technologies such as diagrams of no net loss or net gain of biodiversity and the logic of balance-sheet accounting that is imbricated within the visual design.

Integrating Ecology into Land Planning and Development: Between Disillusionment and Hope, Questioning the Relevance and Implementation of the Mitigation Hierarchy

Scientific research on the mitigation hierarchy has steadily increased over the past few years at the international level. While some seek to improve the application of this public action instrument, others point out its shortcomings and risks. This opinion paper—which focuses on the French context—does not provide an exhaustive overview of existing research but instead targets specific issues considered to be a “priority”. We mainly investigate the relevance and implementation of the mitigation hierarchy, especially from an ecological point of view. Part of this paper thus questions the very principle of biodiversity offsetting (BO)—the last resort of the mitigation hierarchy that brings together numerous controversies—and the adequacy of the mitigation hierarchy with the objective of no net loss (NNL) of biodiversity. The general idea underlying this paper is to show how the mitigation hierarchy has been built and based on what values (mainly economic and legal, which leads us to conclude about the lack of ecology in the policy itself). In doing so, we provide a few perspectives as to what should be done to (better) integrate ecology into land use planning and development.

You Win Some, You Lose Some: Compensating the Loss of Green Space in Cities Considering Heterogeneous Population Characteristics

The increased urbanization and human population growth of the recent decades have resulted in the loss of urban green spaces. One policy used to prevent the loss of urban green space is ecological compensation. Ecological compensation is the final step in the mitigation hierarchy; compensation measures should thus be a last resort after all opportunities to implement the earlier steps of the hierarchy have been exhausted. Ecological compensation should balance the ecological damage, aiming for a “no net loss” of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this study, we develop a simple model that can be used as tool to study the welfare effects of applying ecological compensation when green space is at risk of being exploited, both at an aggregate level for society and for different groups of individuals. Our focus is on urban green space and the value of the ecosystem service—recreation—that urban green space provides. In a case study, we show how the model can be used in the planning process to evaluate the welfare effects of compensation measures at various sites within the city. The results from the case study indicate that factors such as population density and proximity to green space have a large impact on aggregate welfare from green space and on net welfare when different compensation sites are compared against each other.

Smart Sustainable Cities of the New Millennium: Towards Design for Nature

Urban environments consist of a mosaic of natural fragments, planned and unintentional habitats hosting both introduced and spontaneous species. The latter group exploits abandoned and degraded urban niches which, in the case of plants, form what is called the third landscape. In the Anthropocene, cities, open spaces and buildings must be planned and designed considering not only human needs but also those of other living organisms. The scientific approach of habitat sharing is defined as reconciliation ecology, whilst the action of implementing the ecosystem services and functioning of such anthropogenic habitats is called Urban Rehabilitation. However, urban development still represents the main cause of biodiversity loss worldwide. Yet, the approach of planners and landscape architects highly diverges from that of ecologists and scientists on how to perceive, define and design urban green and blue infrastructure. For instance, designers focus on the positive impact that nature (generally associated with indoor and outdoor greeneries) has on human well-being, often neglecting ecosystems’ health. Instead, considering the negative impact of any form of development and to achieve the no net loss Aichi’s objectives, conservationists apply mitigation hierarchy policies to avoid or reduce the impact and to offset biodiversity. The rationale of this review paper is to set the fundamentals for a multidisciplinary design framework tackling the issue of biodiversity loss in the urban environment by design for nature. The method focuses on the building/city/landscape scales and is enabled by emerging digital technologies, i.e., geographic information systems, building information modelling, ecological simulation and computational design.

Mitigating the Impacts of Development Corridors on Biodiversity: A Global Review

Development corridors are extensive, often transnational and linear, geographical areas targeted for investment to help achieve sustainable development. They often comprise the creation of hard infrastructure (i.e., physical structures) and soft infrastructure (i.e., policies, plans, and programmes) involving a variety of actors. They are globally widespread, and likely to be a significant driver of habitat loss. Here, we describe the development corridors phenomenon from a biodiversity perspective and identify the elements of best practice in biodiversity impact mitigation. We use these to carry out a review of the peer reviewed literature on corridors to respond to three questions: (i) how impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services are assessed; (ii) what mitigation measures are discussed to manage these impacts; and (iii) to what extent do these measures approximate to best practice. We found that of 271 publications on development corridors across all continents (except for Antarctica) mentioning biodiversity or ecosystem services, only 100 (37%) assessed impacts on biodiversity and 7 (3%) on ecosystem services. Importantly, only half of these (52, 19% of the total 271 articles) discussed mitigation measures to manage these impacts. These measures focused on avoidance and minimisation and there was scant mention of restoration or ecological compensation illustrating a deficient application of the mitigation hierarchy. We conclude that the academic literature on corridors does not give sufficient consideration to comprehensive mitigation of biodiversity impacts. To change this, impact assessment research needs to acknowledge the complexity of such multi-project and multi-stakeholder initiatives, quantify biodiversity losses due to the full suite of their potential direct, indirect and cumulative impacts, and follow all the steps of the mitigation hierarchy impact framework. We suggest a series of research avenues and policy recommendations to improve impact assessments of corridors towards achieving better biodiversity outcomes.

The Emerging Threat of Extractives Sector to Intact Forest Landscapes

As demand for commodities increases globally, resource-rich countries are focal areas for industrial expansion. The extractives sector is driving unprecedented growth of infrastructure (e.g., roads, railways and pipelines) into sparsely populated regions, which contain some of the world’s remaining intact forests. Yet, the extent of the threat posed by an increased footprint of extractive industries is not well understood. Here we provide a novel global assessment of the potential threat posed to tropical Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs), continuous patches of forest that have no remotely sensed signs of human activity or forest fragmentation, from the extractives sector including mining, oil and gas projects, using one of the most extensive global spatial datasets on extractives concessions to date. We found ∼20% of the global tropical IFL estate is designated as extractive’s concessions, presenting an enormous threat to these forests. Oil and gas concessions overlap with 408,000 km2 of tropical IFLs (7.85% of total IFL area), with the biggest overlap in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea. Mining concessions overlap with 589,000 km2 (11.33%) of tropical IFL area, mainly in Brazil and Democratic Republic of Congo. As the majority of concessions overlapping IFLs are currently at the exploration stages for all types of extractives, now is the time to plan for reducing the potential threat through strategies such as identifying “no go” areas and applying the mitigation hierarchy. Nations and investors should undertake regional strategic environmental assessments to reduce impacts, including potential indirect and cumulative impacts of multiple projects and other threats in the landscape. We also call for banks that funders of extractives projects to apply global best practice industry environmental safeguards that recognize the value of intact forests and the risk of cumulative impacts to these unique sites.