Keen to go ahead with a controversial market-based strategy, which featured heavily in the government's 2010 Natural Environment White Paper, Defra Secretary Owen Paterson has published the main consultation document on Biodiveristy offsetting sooner than expected.

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Announcing the release of its biodiversity offsetting 'Green Paper' on Thursday (5th September), Defra claimed the tool will allow for a regeneration of the natural environmental whilst supporting economic growth. However, critics suggest the approach amounts to a "license to destroy" and that its implementation entails a fundamental oversimplification of complex environmental processes. The concept essentially means that developers can destroy ecologically sensitive areas, so long as they fund conservation work on a comparable habitat elsewhere.

Defra claimed on Thursday that biodiversity offsetting "could improve the environment for wildlife as well as simplifying the existing planning process" and that "Biodiversity offsetting has already been successful in 25 other countries including the USA, Australia and Germany."

However, as the British Ecological Society (BES) points out, in spite of the government's tangible enthusiasm for the policy, "there are still many uncertainties in both the science behind the process and its implementation in the real world." Though Defra has launched two-year pilot offsetting schemes in 6 areas across England, a year into the projects uptake has been low and no data from the trials has yet been published.

BES stated in late July that the pilot schemes have "not [been] as successful as might have been hoped… not one offset has made it off the drawing board."

Nevertheless, some in the farming community have embraced the financial opportunities the policy would bring; property company Savills last month encouraged farmers to take advantage of biodiversity offsetting pilot schemes to secure funding in return for boosting biodiversity on their holdings. Farmers who create or restore habitats could earn money by selling the 'conservation credits' generated by their work to developers.

Government and industry support for controversial policy

Having first featured in the Natural Environment White Paper, Biodiversity offsetting was a key recommendation made to the government by the Ecosystems Market Task Force in its report 'Realising Nature’s Value', published in March 2013. The Task Force was made up of a group of business leaders chaired by Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive Officer of Kingfisher plc, which owns a number of home improvement stores. He described biodiversity offsetting as an initiative which would achieve a "net gain for nature".

The consultation launched today will last for nine weeks and conclude in early November. Defra said it will then put forward proposals on how biodiversity offsetting might work in the UK.

UEA study raises concerns over biodiversity offsetting

Although policy makers in industry and government are eager to roll out the scheme, independent research in the area suggests the concept may be fundamentally flawed.

In September last year, scientists from the University of East Anglia published a damning report on efforts to recreate coastal salt marshes. The report, which presented the results of a five year study, found massively reduced biodiversity on artificially created salt marshes, which had been established in response to losses of natural marshland.

European law dictates that each time natural salt marsh is lost to coastal development or erosion caused by rises in sea-levels an artificial marshland must be built displaying "equivalent biological characteristics" to the natural ecosystem. However, the UEA researchers found that efforts to recreate these "unique tidal areas" have so far fallen short and that the range of plants and animals endemic to these coastal ecosystems are dramatically reduced in manufactured marshes.

The researchers concluded that their findings "demonstrate very clearly that marshes created by managed realignment are not biologically equivalent to natural ones" and, by extension, current methods of biodiversity offsetting employed in the UK and throughout Europe are therefore "failing to satisfy the biodiversity requirements of the EU Habitats Directive."  

Even so, Defra Secretary Owen Paterson said upon launching the consultation on Thursday, "Offsetting is an exciting opportunity to look at how we can improve the environment as well as grow the economy. There is no reason why wildlife and development can't flourish side by side."

Reacting to the Defra secretary's announcement, Friends of the Earth offered wholesale condemnation of the plans, calling the policy "a license to trash nature". FoE Nature Campaigner Sandra Bell commented, "Nature is unique and complex – not something that can be bulldozed in one place and recreated in another at the whim of a developer. Instead of putting nature up for sale the Government should strengthen its protection through the planning system and set out bold plans to safeguard and restore wildlife across the UK."

Bell said that, as a result of the policy, communities could stand to lose cherished local nature sites with no chance to object and no say in where new habitats are developed. She added that the true value of natural spaces risks being undervalued and oversimplified, common criticisms of biodiversity offsetting and the concept of ecosystem services upon which it relies, as the assessment necessary to inform offsetting may not account for nature's contribution to flood mitigation, human health, or pollination services provided by bees and other insects.