England will soon introduce one of the world’s most ambitious biodiversity policies in “Biodiversity Net Gain”.
This policy effectively mandates that any new development leaves biodiversity in a better state than before it was constructed. It was initially meant to go into effect in November, but the government has pushed back its implementation until 2024.
In order to understand the potential impacts of the Biodiversity Net Gain, our team has been tracking development projects approved over the last three years in six councils across England that were early adopters of the policy.
Our latest paper, published this month, reveals several fundamental challenges that threaten the integrity of the policy’s environmental and economic outcomes.
We find that the oversight, monitoring and enforcement of biodiversity improvements supposedly delivered under the policy need urgent attention.
For example, there is a clear “governance gap”, where the system for monitoring biodiversity gains delivered on the site of new developments is weaker than for gains purchased from elsewhere. The process is overseen by local planning departments, which are typically lacking in capacity and ecological expertise.
Biodiversity Net Gain is an essential pillar of the country’s plans for attracting private finance into nature conservation to achieve its overarching environmental objectives.
Ultimately, the challenges we identify threaten the integrity of one of England’s most important environmental markets – and with it, the environmental outcomes of the government’s nature markets strategy.
Biodiversity Net Gain
Under the Biodiversity Net Gain policy, developers have three ways to offset their “biodiversity liability” – the damage their project does to nature. Biodiversity Net Gain applies to most developments, such as housing and smaller infrastructure projects. The policy will apply to major infrastructure projects from 2025 onwards.
First, they can enhance biodiversity somewhere within the development – so-called “on-site” gains. These on-site gains can take the form of, for example, sowing wildflowers along road verges or managing some of the grassland within a housing development to promote wildlife, rather than for traditional landscaping.
If developers can’t meet their liabilities on-site, their second option is to use biodiversity “units” from ecological improvements elsewhere. Under the policy, these units are supposed to mirror the habitat that is impacted by the development, so that when developers damage habitats, they must replace them with habitats that are at least as valuable, from a conservation perspective, as those lost.
Some of these units might come from the new “net-gain market”. Land managers create these units by implementing conservation actions on their land, such as converting low-productivity pasture into a field managed for wildflowers. Then, they sell these units to developers.
Alternatively, some developers are developing their own habitat banks, creating biodiversity units in one place to offset the impacts of their developments elsewhere.
Last, if no units are available through either of these pathways, developers can buy “statutory biodiversity credits” directly from the national government.
These credits loosely resemble the units sold via the market. The government holds a stock of these units as a last resort for developers who cannot offset their damage in other ways. For example, they may offset damage to particularly rare types of habitat for which there may not be suitable credits available on the standard market.
Importantly, the price levels for these statutory units have been set deliberately high, in an attempt to disincentivise developers from relying on these credits.
The ‘governance gap’
Our dataset spans around 1,600 hectares of development footprint that have been submitted or approved for development over the last three years in these six early-adopter councils: West and South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, Cornwall, Leeds City and Tunbridge Wells.
Our team has been collating and analysing the biodiversity assessments submitted to these authorities for each project.
We’ve analysed the trades occurring under the policy and the rules that govern them. Additionally, we have quantified any errors embedded in the developers’ biodiversity assessments. Our research has identified several shortfalls that need addressing for this nature market to be able to deliver on its goals.
Our first key finding is that around one-quarter of all the biodiversity units delivered under the policy so far fall within a “governance gap” – meaning that they are likely to go unmonitored, and may even be legally unenforceable.
As a result, there is a very high probability that regulators will not be able to take any action if these promised gains are not delivered.
This will likely translate into a large chunk of these units not materialising in reality, as there is little incentive for developers to deliver these units in full if there is no credible enforcement mechanism.
The problem is that the standards and regulations of the three offset pathways vary considerably.
There is reasonably stringent governance to ensure that biodiversity units purchased on the offsetting market are delivered in reality. Sellers will have to submit their offsets to a national database, monitor biodiversity changes and report on the ecological development of the site at regular intervals.
Contrary to these standards, the system for monitoring, reporting and enforcing units delivered “on-site” is much weaker. The government has suggested that the existing planning enforcement system can be used to oversee on-site units.
The planning enforcement system was never designed for such a task, and in its current form, is unsuitable for fulfilling this role.
Under the current system, local authorities are explicitly advised to only take enforcement action, such as warnings or fines, if a developer’s violation of a planning condition results in “serious harm to a local public amenity”. Although it is unclear how this will apply to the Biodiversity Net Gain policy, the failure to deliver a habitat that a developer promised in a planning application a few years prior is extremely unlikely to trigger this threshold.
Developers also do not have to log their on-site gains on the national Biodiversity Net Gain register, which means that many of these projects are likely to go unmonitored. Even if they underperform relative to the original promise in the planning application, there is no credible system in place to hold developers to account for such non-delivery.
Risk of non-delivery
In our research, we have found that around one-quarter of all the units delivered under the policy are at a high risk of non-delivery because of this governance gap.
While the regulation of a specific kind of biodiversity unit within a single policy might sound unimportant, this actually has serious implications for how England’s nature markets function.
The core pillar of England’s ambitions for drawing private finance into nature conservation is the Biodiversity Net Gain market. Any biodiversity units that are delivered on-site by developers are units they will not need to purchase from the off-site market. So the less stringent the standards in the on-site system, the more this will drain demand for units from the off-site market, which is relatively more ecologically robust.
Although we recognise our data is preliminary, we estimate that if these under-regulated biodiversity units were to be delivered via the off-site market instead, the demand for biodiversity units could rise by a factor of four.
This could significantly increase the amount of conservation implemented on private land and, therefore, the amount of private finance flowing into conservation projects on private land.
There is precedent for this. The English scheme was partially informed by the US wetland mitigation markets. In 2008, those markets underwent reform to address a similar governance gap.
In the US case, the standards applied to developer-led and third-party projects diverged enormously, meaning a range of low-quality mitigation projects were being implemented by developers. The 2008 compensation rule in the US wetland mitigation system addressed this disparity by ensuring that the same standards were applied across all forms of compensation.
Lacking capacity
Our research also reveals other interesting, consequential patterns. Perhaps the most important to the integrity of this emerging market is the current lack of capacity in local authorities to be able to deliver on the Biodiversity Net Gain policy.
Local authorities do the best they can with the resources they have, but they have undergone stringent funding cuts since 2008.
At the last count, around 60% of local planning authorities have no in-house ecological expertise – which is essential for delivering biodiversity gains effectively.
In our study, we evaluated how many of the applications contained a basic error in their calculations: we checked to see if the area of the site before and after development added up to the same amount.
We found that the areas did not add up in around one-fifth of all projects. Of these, around half had already been accepted by the local planning authorities. One explanation for this oversight could be that planners were so rushed they did not have time to examine the calculations included with the application.
This suggests we have not yet addressed the serious capacity shortages in the councils – who are ultimately going to be the public bodies overseeing the delivery of Biodiversity Net Gain at local scales. This is clear evidence that further investment in local planning capacity is required.
Environmental markets have the potential to be powerful mechanisms for improving nature, but one of the fundamental features of biodiversity compensation markets is that they deliver biodiversity gains that make up for an equal and opposite loss elsewhere.
This means that every biodiversity unit that is promised by developers in order to secure planning permission, but then not delivered in reality, has legitimised the loss of biodiversity elsewhere.
Making sure that these policies lead to direct, robust gains in the quality of nature is therefore absolutely essential to ensure that the markets-focused approach to drawing private finance into nature recovery in England leaves the environment better, rather than worse, off.
The post Guest post: Fixing the gaps in England’s ‘biodiversity net-gain’ policy appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Fixing the gaps in England’s ‘biodiversity net-gain’ policy
A new independent study by Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka (Centro Universitário de Brasília) and Dr Ben Tippet (King’s College London), commissioned by Greenpeace International, reveals that current International Seabed Authority revenue-sharing proposals would return virtually nothing to developing countries — despite the requirement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that deep sea mining must benefit humankind as a whole.
Instead, the analysis shows that the overwhelming economic value would flow to a handful of private corporations, primarily headquartered in the Global North.
Download the report:
Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area
Executive Summary: Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/greenpeace-reports/equity-benefit-sharing-and-financial-architecture-in-the-international-seabed-area/
Climate Change
Pacific nations would be paid only thousands for deep sea mining, while mining companies set to make billions, new research reveals
SYDNEY/FIJI, Thursday 26 February 2026 — New independent research commissioned by Greenpeace International has revealed that Pacific Island states would receive mere thousands of dollars in payment from deep sea mining per year, placing the region as one of the most affected but worst-off beneficiaries in the world.
The research by legal professor Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka and development economist Dr Ben Tippet reveals that mechanisms proposed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for sharing any future revenues from deep sea mining would leave developing nations with meagre, token payments. Pacific Island nations would receive only USD $46,000 per year in the short term, then USD $241,000 per year in the medium term, averaging out to barely USD $382,000 per year for 28 years – an entire annual income for a nation that is less than some individual CEOs’ salaries. Mining companies would rake in over USD $13.5 billion per year, taking up to 98% of the revenues.
The analysis shows that under a scenario where six deep sea mining sites begin operating in the early 2030s, the revenues that states would actually receive are extraordinarily small. This is in contrast to the clear mandate of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which requires mining to be carried out for the benefit of humankind as a whole.[1] The real beneficiaries, the research shows, would be, yet again, a handful of corporations in the Global North.
Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific Shiva Gounden, said:
“What the Pacific is being promised amounts to little more than scraps. The people of the Pacific would sacrifice the most and receive the least if deep sea mining goes ahead. We are being asked to trade in our spiritual and cultural connection to our oceans, and risk our livelihoods and food sources, for almost nothing in return.
“The deep sea mining industry has manipulated the Pacific and has lied to our people for too long, promising prosperity and jobs that simply do not exist. The wealthy CEOs and deep sea mining companies will pocket the cash while the people of the Pacific see no material benefits. The Pacific will not benefit from deep sea mining, and our sacrifice is too big to allow it to go ahead. The Pacific Ocean is not a commodity, and it is not for sale.”
Using proposals submitted by the ISA’s Finance Committee between 2022 and 2025, the returns to states barely register in national accounts. After administrative costs, institutional expenses, and compensation funds are deducted, little, if anything, remains to distribute [3].
Author Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka of the Centro Universitário de Brasília said:
“What’s described as global benefit-sharing based on equity and intergenerational justice increasingly looks like a framework for managing scarcity that would deliver almost no real benefits to anyone other than the deep sea mining industry. The structural limitations of the proposed mechanism would offer little more than symbolic returns to the rest of the world, particularly developing countries lacking technological and financial capacity.”
The ISA will meet in March for its first session of the year. Currently, 40 countries back a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep sea mining.
Gounden added: “The deep sea belongs to all humankind, and our people take great pride in being the custodians of our Pacific Ocean. Protecting this with everything we have is not only fair and responsible but what we see as our ancestral duty. The only equitable path is to leave the minerals where they are and stop deep sea mining before it starts.
“The decision on the future of the ocean must be a process that centres the rights and voices of Pacific communities as the traditional custodians. Clearly, deep sea mining will not benefit the Pacific, and the only sensible way forward is a moratorium.”
—ENDS—
Notes
[1] A key condition for governments to permit deep sea mining to start in the international seabed is that it ‘be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole’, particularly developing nations, according to international law (Article 136-140, 148, 150, and 160(2)(g), the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea).
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact Kimberley Bernard on +61407 581 404 or kbernard@greenpeace.org
Climate Change
North Carolina Regulators Nix $1.2 Billion Federal Proposal to Dredge Wilmington Harbor
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to explain how it would mitigate environmental harms, including PFAS contamination.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can’t dredge 28 miles of the Wilmington Harbor as planned, after North Carolina environmental regulators determined the billion-dollar proposal would be inconsistent with the state’s coastal management policies.
North Carolina Regulators Nix $1.2 Billion Federal Proposal to Dredge Wilmington Harbor
Bravery Meets Tragedy: An Unending Story
Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area
Pacific nations would be paid only thousands for deep sea mining, while mining companies set to make billions, new research reveals
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