Biodiversity offsetting can relocate nature away from people: An empirical case study in Western Australia

Abstract

Regular contact with nature provides multiple health benefits for people, but biodiversity is declining fast in an urbanizing world. Biodiversity offsets are implemented to compensate for the negative residual impacts of economic development projects on biodiversity, but the impacts on people who stand to lose biodiversity from their local environment are rarely considered. Offsetting typically involves creating, restoring or protecting biodiversity values at a specified site that can be located some distance away from the development site. In this article, we explore whether any relocation of nature is occurring due to development and offsets in Western Australia (WA); a jurisdiction with one of the world's few spatially referenced and comprehensive public offset registers. We analyzed data from 158 projects within the WA Environmental Offsets Register. We compared the location of development sites within 50 km (the urban and peri urban zone) and 500 km (~one day's drive) of the central business district (CBD) of Perth with the associated offset sites. The development and offset process together can be considered to contribute to a loss of urban nature as the offset sites tended to be further away from urban areas than the associated development sites. The offset sites were also located in significantly lower population density areas. However, offsets increased the publicly accessible land area by changing land ownership and creating amenity benefit by improving nature values on public land. Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent relocation of nature further from people is balanced by increased public access to nature. In order to maintain nature connectedness, ecosystem service delivery and environmental justice in cities, we argue offset policies should require spatial proximity between impact and offset sites.

The consequences of coastal offsets for fisheries

“…Similar outcomes have been noted for ecosystem services affected by terrestrial offset exchanges. For example, Kalliolevo et al (2021) found that offset sites tended to be further from urban zones than impact sites, and this resulted in net loss of nature experienced by urban dwellers.…”

A transformative mission for prioritising nature in Australian cities

“…Whilst there may be legislation to protect threatened or vulnerable species and ecosystems within cities, biodiversity offsetting schemes (where biodiversity losses in one place are ‘offset’ in another place) often result in questionable ecological outcomes (Bull et al 2013 ; Maron et al 2016 ). Reforming offsetting metrics and assessments in the urban landscape is important given that offsetting often does not account for the ‘place-based’ value of nature and results in a localised loss of biodiversity in the places where people live (Garrard et al 2018 ; Kalliolevo et al 2021 ).…”

Social acceptance of biodiversity offsetting: Motivations and practices in the designing of an emerging mechanism

“…Our analysis shows, that for public entities this comes back to finding the most efficient ways to use a fixed conservation budget while also responding to diverse land use pressures. Particularly in urban areas where nature is scarce, ensuring proximity of offsets in order to not decrease accessibility to nature and its impacts on wellbeing is important (Kalliolevo et al, 2021) and may influence community acceptance greatly. However, in densely populated areas, finding any unused land for offsets is almost impossible and questions about multifunctionality of offset areas becomes a critical question.…”