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Nature Swapped and Nature Lost pp 75–108Cite as

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Equivalent Natures and Non-places

Abstract

As explained in the previous chapter, achieving equivalence between ecological losses in the development site and ecological gains in the offset site is the cornerstone of the biodiversity offset design process. Even though offsetting programmes differ in terms of their equivalence requirements, ecological equivalence is a fundamental aspect that lies at the core of the definition of an offset and is widely acknowledged as necessary for achieving No Net Loss of biodiversity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Even though BBOP’s definition of NNL is widely accepted, so far, no metrics have been designed to account for all these aspects. BBOP also argues that other biodiversity surrogates or economic evaluation methods focused on people’s cultural and use values can be used to establish “a package of benefits needed to motivate stakeholders to support the offset, compensating them for residual impacts on their livelihoods and amenity and engaging them in offset implementation (e.g. through sustainable livelihood activities from which they benefit)” but again there is no significant progress on this so far.

  2. 2.

    The habitat hectares metric has been initially developed by Parkers et al. (2003) and updated by the Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment. The method offers a way of calculating losses and gains in vegetation, based on units of measurement that consider the area affected and the quality or condition of the vegetation impacted. These are described in a “benchmark” that sets out at least 10 types of habitat attribute, such as: number of large trees, canopy cover, number of understory lifeforms, cover of weeds, recruitment, cover of organic litter, abundance of logs, patch size, proximity of remnant vegetation, and distance to core area. The attributes in the benchmark are weighted according to their significance to the overall condition of the system. Each attribute is measured at the impact site before the impact and the predicted score after the impact, comparing the measurements against the benchmark that represents the pristine condition of the habitat in question. The scores for each attribute are then added to provide an estimate of the site’s condition expressed as a percentage pristine condition and the area of the habitat is multiplied by this percentage. The same approach is used to estimate the gains at the potential impact sites, comparing the actual measurements before the offset activities start with predicted realistic outcomes from the offset, again compared with the benchmark levels (see IEEP 2014 for further information).

  3. 3.

    For more information on the HS2 case see Chapter 6.

  4. 4.

    As Maron et al. (2016) point out, in practice, regulators rarely interpret No Net Loss to mean no biodiversity loss relative to before the impact; rather, it generally means maintaining some presumed trajectory of “background” decline.

  5. 5.

    See also https://ejatlas.org/conflict/rio-tinto-qmm-ilmenite-mine-madagascar.

  6. 6.

    In a speech on November 11, 1947, Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”.

  7. 7.

    Paul Sears (1964, p. 12) in his article Ecology-a subversive subject argued that “by its very nature, ecology affords a continuing critique of man’s [sic] operations within the ecosystem”.

  8. 8.

    As Jasanoff (2011, pp. 633–634) argues “ethics committees engage in a polite process of opinion formation, oriented toward elite consensus-building, in which the values and sensibilities of a very few, highly educated, articulate individuals stand in for the untrained, and allegedly uninformed, preferences of the multitude.” […] “Indeed, for many scientists, ‘understanding the science’ and ‘understanding how science works’ serve almost as threshold tests for the right to speak about the ethical dimensions of emerging science and technology.”

  9. 9.

    As Smith (2010, p. 126) argues even though this is an original idea of Lefebvre, one can detect its embryos in the work of Marx, Luxembourg and Lenin.

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    Elia Apostolopoulou

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Apostolopoulou, E. (2020). Equivalent Natures and Non-places. In: Nature Swapped and Nature Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46788-3_3

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