The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [26]
In other countries, “biodiversity credits” are being designed that might offer a revenue stream rewarding those who protect and manage biodiverse habitats. In New South Wales, the state government’s environment department has set up a “BioBanking” scheme where developers and landowners can trade biodiversity offsets. Some private companies have been making similar pioneering moves: In Borneo the local government has partnered with the Australian company New Forests to provide an income for the protection of its 34,000-hectare Malua Forest Reserve. Both individuals and businesses can purchase “Biodiversity Conservation Certificates” that represent the “biodiversity benefits of 100 square metres of protection and restoration of the Malua Forest Reserve”—habitat for “endangered wild orangutans as well as gibbons, clouded leopards, pygmy elephants, and over 300 species of birds,” according to the Malua BioBank website.55
As with carbon offsets, aimed at mopping up an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases to those unavoidably released elsewhere, a partnership between businesses, governments, and conservationist groups is currently developing the concept of biodiversity offsets. Their goal is to design offsets that compensate for biodiversity impacts arising from business activities like mining and dam-building, potentially raising considerable sums to protect and enhance ecosystems elsewhere. To count as offsets, schemes must be additional to what would otherwise have happened, provide benefits that last as long as the damage they are intended to address, and deliver equitable outcomes that bring benefits to local people and communities. In addition, offsets are recognized as only being appropriate as a last resort: The so-called “mitigation hierarchy,” in order of importance, is avoid, minimize, restore, and only then offset.56 Like achieving carbon neutrality, the principle of “no net loss” of biodiversity—or even better, “net positive impact”—should and hopefully soon will become part of mainstream business practice.
Protecting natural systems can provide value for money even in the most direct sense. Creating marine protected areas enhances fish stocks, providing benefits both to biodiversity and fishermen in neighboring areas. The World Bank and UN Food and Agriculture Organization have estimated that $50 billion is lost each year in terms of economic benefits that could be realized if the world’s fisheries were managed sustainably.57 It may seem counterintuitive, but a reduction of fishing effort could lead to an increase in overall fish catch. This is a matter of life and death for the over 1 billion mainly poor people who are dependent on fish for their primary source of protein and whose coastal fisheries have often been scoured out by foreign trawlers from rich nations whose own seas are exhausted.
But voluntary measures will only achieve so much. For biodiversity protection to really work, and for the funds to flow, it needs to be given the force of law. Here too recent progress gives cause for some qualified optimism. The Convention on Biological Diversity, long the poor relation of the Convention on Climate Change, enjoyed a boost in October 2010 with the agreement by world governments of a “Strategic Plan” for the decade to 2020, intriguingly subtitled “Living in Harmony with Nature.” The plan directs governments to mainstream biodiversity concerns “throughout government and society,” and to take “direct action…to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services” by “means of protected areas, habitat restoration, species recovery programmes and other targeted conservation interventions.”58 These requests are still voluntary at the international level, but national governments are encouraged to turn them into law to ensure that companies, individuals, and institutions take biodiversity seriously.
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