In recent years, “biodiversity offsets” and “credits” have been promoted as one of the key ways to finance nature conservation and support global biodiversity goals.

Put simply, “biodiversity offsetting” is a system for placing a value on a habitat, plant or animal, meaning the “credit” or “unit” can be bought or sold to “offset” damage being done, thereby creating a financial incentive to conserve natural assets elsewhere.

Biodiversity-rich developing countries have been demanding more public finance and “debt forgiveness” from developed countries – which is distinct from climate finance – to help meet their biodiversity targets.

Meanwhile, rich countries, such as Australia, the UK and France, have been promoting and rolling out new “nature markets”, claiming that conservation budgets are stretched and that private finance must play a more prominent part in closing the finance “gap”.

Biodiversity offsetting now sits at the heart of these tensions.

“Until now, we were doing development without any due regard for biodiversity,” Prof David Hill of the UK’s Environment Bank tells Carbon Brief. He argues that regulation-backed biodiversity markets could “provide a pressure valve by which finance can be generated [for] proper biodiversity restoration”.

Critics of offsetting disagree. “These metrics are quite simplistic, mechanistic and crude,” Dr Evangelia Apostolopoulou of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership tells Carbon Brief. “What you need to actually question is the very idea of the economic valuation of nature.”

While biodiversity-offset markets have so far escaped the intense criticism that carbon-offsetting has been subjected to, they are growing in prominence and were included as one of the ways to finance a global deal for nature agreed at the UN’s COP15 biodiversity summit last year.

In this in-depth Q&A, Carbon Brief breaks down the history of biodiversity offsets, where and how they are being used around the world and concerns surrounding their use.

Read the full article on Carbon Brief.

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