Mining and associated infrastructure developments can present themselves as economic opportunities that are difficult to forego for developing and industrialised countries alike. Almost inevitably, however, they lead to biodiversity loss. This trade-off can be greatest in economically poor but highly biodiverse regions. Biodiversity offsets have, therefore, increasingly been promoted as a mechanism to help achieve both the aims of development and biodiversity conservation. Accordingly, this mechanism is emerging as a key tool for multinational mining companies to demonstrate good environmental stewardship. Relying on offsets to achieve "no-net-loss" of biodiversity, however, requires certainty in their ecological integrity where they are used to sanction habitat destruction. Here, we discuss real-world practices in biodiversity offsetting by assessing how well some leading initiatives internationally integrate critical aspects of biodiversity attributes, net loss accounting and project management. With the aim of improving, rather than merely critiquing the approach, we analyse different aspects of biodiversity offsetting. Further, we analyse the potential pitfalls of developing counterfactual scenarios of biodiversity loss or gains in a project's absence. In this, we draw on insights from experience with carbon offsetting. This informs our discussion of realistic projections of project effectiveness and permanence of benefits to ensure no net losses, and the risk of displacing, rather than avoiding biodiversity losses ("leakage"). We show that the most prominent existing biodiversity offset initiatives employ broad and somewhat arbitrary parameters to measure habitat value and do not sufficiently consider real-world challenges in compensating losses in an effective and lasting manner. We propose a more transparent and science-based approach, supported with a new formula, to help design biodiversity offsets to realise their potential in enabling more responsible mining that better balances economic development opportunities for mining and biodiversity conservation.
Climate change is a phenomenon of the Earth system, which is characterized by thresholds and non-linear change. This analysis considers the adequacy of insurance (in its broadest sense) responses to climate risk. This paper provides novel critiques of insurance system responses to climate change and of the attendant political economy perspective on the relationship between insurance and climate change. A complex adaptive systems (CAS) analysis suggests that ecologically effective (i.e. strong) mitigation is the only viable approach to manage medium-and long-term climate risk -for the insurance system itself and for human societies more widely. In contrast, we find that even the most substantial insurance system responses to date are generally adaptive and weakly mitigative. This analysis extends an earlier political economy perspective that explains the limitations of insurance system responses to climate change, but provides little guidance to the ecological implications of such responses. As such, this paper raises questions about the ongoing viability of the insurance system, and hence about the many aspects of human societies globally reliant on the insurance system as their primary risk governance tool. We conclude that the CAS approach provides new insights, which could prompt insurance system evolution in support of effective climate risk governance.
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