We are currently facing significant challenges in environmental management that must be addressed to maintain the health of our planet and our population. While carbon offsetting in its various forms is widespread globally, few countries have fully legislated and put into operation other offset policies. This edited collection aims to fill the gap of knowledge on environmental offsets, from theory to practice. Environmental Offsets addresses four major forms of environmental offsets – biodiversity offsets, carbon offsets, offsetting the depletion of non-renewable resources and offsetting the destruction of built heritage. The authors discuss their research and provide case studies from around Australia and across the developing world. Using examples such as the Sydney Olympics, the Bakossi Forest Reserve in Cameroon and green roof gardens, this book highlights the strengths and weaknesses of environmental offsetting and illustrates how jobs can be created in the offsetting process. Environmental Offsets is both a historical source in our understanding of environmental offsetting and a guide to the way forward. It illustrates what works, what does not and what can be improved for the future.

This book deals with the new concept of biodiversity offsets. The aim of offsetting schemes is to achieve no let loss or even net gain of biodiversity. Offsets obey a mitigation hierarchy and reflect the precautionary and polluter-pays principle in regard to project impacts. Readers gain insights into current debates on biodiversity policies, with top experts outlining theoretical principles and the latest research findings. At the same time the focus is on practical application and case studies. Today there is a lively international discussion among practitioners and scientists on the optimal legal framework, metrics and design of habitat banks to ensure the success of biodiversity offsets and to minimise the risks of failure or misuse. Contributing to the debate, this volume presents the activities and practices of biodiversity offsetting already implemented in Europe in selected EU member states, and the lessons that can be learnt from them. Readers may be surprised at how much experience already exists in these countries. A further aim of the book is to offer grounded insights on the road ahead, and foster a more intensive and fruitful discussion on how offsetting can be extended and improved upon, so that it becomes a key and effective component of Europe’s biodiversity conservation policy framework.

This report examines the key design and implementation features that need to be considered to ensure that biodiversity offset programmes are environmentally effective, economically efficient, and distributionally equitable.

We are witnessing an alarming, global biodiversity crisis with an ongoing loss of species and their habitats. In response, a number of tools and approaches – including some that are contested – are being explored and promoted. Biodiversity offsets are one such approach, and deserve critical examination since the debate surrounding them has often been oversimplified and lacking practical evidence. As such, this study presents a refined typology including seven types of biodiversity offsets and taking into account different contexts, governance arrangements and drivers. It draws on a detailed analysis of theoretical concepts to explain the voluntary implementation of biodiversity offsets using an internet-based (netnographic) research approach. Furthermore it builds on a broad global explorative base of 72 practical examples and presents in-depth case studies for each type. The results reveal a number of global tendencies that allow recommendations to be made for different locations, contexts and stakeholders. They also encourage the expansion of this research field to respond to the pressing needs of policy and practice.

This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) offsets have long been promoted as an important element of a comprehensive climate policy approach. Offset programs can reduce the overall cost of achieving a given emission goal by enabling emission reductions to occur where costs are lower. Offsets have the potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits, through technology development and transfer. They can also develop human and institutional capacity for reducing emissions in sectors and locations not included in a cap and trade or a mandatory government policy. However, offsets can pose a risk to the environmental integrity of climate actions, especially if issues surrounding additionality, permanence, leakage, quantification and verification are not adequately addressed. The challenge is to design offset programs and policies that can maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential risks. This handbook provides a systematic and comprehensive review of existing offset programs. It looks at what offsets are, how offset mechanisms function, and the successes and pitfalls they have encountered. Coverage includes offset programs across the full swath of applications including mandatory and voluntary systems, government regulated and private markets, carbon offset funds, and accounting and reporting protocols such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol and ISO 14064. Learning from the successes and failures of these programs will be essential to crafting effective climate policy. This is an essential reference for all regulators, policy makers, business leaders and NGOs concerned with the design and operation of GHG offset programs world-wide. Published with SEI

For decades, the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but the most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis – the use of market-based programs – hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale. Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy – government-led strategies – to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.