Ecological compensation as instruments in municipality planning

The conclusions of the project can be summarized as follows:

• Despite the lack of clear legal support in the Planning and Building Act to claim compensation, several Swedish municipalities apply compensation today, and many see it as a future development in the municipality.
• The current Planning and Building Act represents a strong restriction for an efficient implementation of environmental compensation and changes in the Act according to the propositions in SOU 2017:34 are necessary to make environmental compensation in municipal planning a strong policy instrument related to the Swedish work for the national environmental objectives.
• There are major differences between municipalities in how they work with compensation. The experience that exists in these pioneer municipalities provides an important basis for further development of compensation in municipal planning in Sweden.
• There is clear public support in Skåne’s urban areas for applying environmental compensation.
• Further development of procedures and structures are needed to set targets and to follow up and evaluate the compensation measures implemented.
• Further procedures are needed to set targets and to follow up and evaluate the compensation measures implemented.
• There is no uniform approach to the design of compensatory measures and to how compensation needs should be assessed and balanced against the benefits of the compensatory measures. Methods for assessing the values created by compensation need to be developed in order to become more applicable in Swedish municipalities.
• The lack of quantifiable targets related to the use of environmental compensation, and lack of assessment, follow-up, and documentation of the values created by implemented compensation measures, makes it difficult to evaluate the effect of using environmental compensation as a policy instrument in municipal planning. Still, it is reasonable to believe that the implemented measures have contributed to a reduced loss of environmental values.