Biodiversity offsets provide a mechanism for maintaining or enhancing environmental values in situations where development is sought, despite negative environmental impacts. They seek to ensure that unavoidable deleterious environmental impacts of development are balanced by environmental gains. When onsite impacts warrant the use of offsets there is often little attention paid to make sure that the location of offset sites provides the greatest conservation benefit, ensuring they are consistent with landscape level conservation goals. In most offset frameworks it is difficult for developers to proactively know the offset requirements they will need to implement. Here we propose a framework to address these needs. We propose a series of rules for selecting offset sites that meet the conservation needs of potentially impacted biological targets. We then discuss an accounting approach that seeks to support offset ratio determinations based on a structured and transparent approach. To demonstrate the approach, we present a framework developed in partnership with the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development to reform existing mitigation regulatory processes.
OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2013, 5 4962
As urbanization gathers pace and climate change increases the number and magnitude of many natural hazards, cities are increasingly becoming hot spots for disasters. Although the role of appropriate urban forms in reducing disaster vulnerability has been recognized for some time, the majority of its potential remains focused on long-term mitigation efforts. In contrast, examination of the relationships with short-term disaster management activities such as response and immediate recovery has not been thoroughly conducted. This paper contributes to this shortfall by analysing a critical type of rapid onset disaster, a near-field tsunami, and the role of urban form in supporting the populations’ core response activities of evacuation and sheltering. The Chilean city of Iquique (affected by a severe earthquake and minor tsunami in 2014) is examined using a mixed methods approach that provides the basis for proposed macro-scale and micro-scale changes in its urban form; these modifications, in turn, are assessed with geographic information system (GIS) and agent-based computer models. The results show important existing evacuation vulnerability throughout major areas of the city (as the result of interrelated critical conditions), which nonetheless could be significantly reduced by the changes proposed. Further steps in this iterative process, in turn, could lead to the development of evacuation-based urban design standards capable of being transferred to different tsunami-prone contexts around the world.
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