Biodiversity offsetting

Neither voluntary efforts nor public conservation policies are sufficient to achieve public goals concerning biodiversity. Destruction and fragmentation of habitats continue and in response, new conservation tools are used. One of these is biodiversity offsetting, or ecological compensation, which is increasingly used all over the world. In short, offsetting means compensating losses of nature values after attempts to avoid, minimize and restore damage, with no net loss or ideally net benefits as the overall result. However, biodiversity offsetting raises a number of ethical and legal issues, which this research project has explored in detail.

An overall conclusion is that the legislation in place needs to be developed on several points, on top of what has been proposed by the Governmental Inquiry on Biodiversity Offsetting, not least in order to ensure that offsets function over longer periods of time and to stimulate societal participation. There is also a need for regulation that better prevents that really high nature values will be exploited with biodiversity offsetting as a legitimating basis. With developed legislation, biodiversity offsetting can become a more effective, efficient and legitimate tool in nature conservation.