Policy Development for Environmental Licensing and Biodiversity Offsets in Latin America

Abstract

Attempts to meet biodiversity goals through application of the mitigation hierarchy have gained wide traction globally with increased development of public policy, lending standards, and corporate practices. With interest in biodiversity offsets increasing in Latin America, we seek to strengthen the basis for policy development through a review of major environmental licensing policy frameworks in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Here we focused our review on an examination of national level policies to evaluate to which degree current provisions promote positive environmental outcomes. All the surveyed countries have national-level Environmental Impact Assessment laws or regulations that cover the habitats present in their territories. Although most countries enable the use of offsets only Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru explicitly require their implementation. Our review has shown that while advancing quite detailed offset policies, most countries do not seem to have strong requirements regarding impact avoidance. Despite this deficiency most countries have a strong foundation from which to develop policy for biodiversity offsets, but several issues require further guidance, including how best to: (1) ensure conformance with the mitigation hierarchy; (2) identify the most environmentally preferable offsets within a landscape context; (3) determine appropriate mitigation replacement ratios; and (4) ensure appropriate time and effort is given to monitor offset performance.

Mitigation for one & all: An integrated framework for mitigation of development impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services

“…Many calls have been made for the inclusion of ecosystem services in the mitigation hierarchy (Boyd and Wainger, 2003;Geneletti, 2011;Baker et al, 2013), yielding policy requirements in some arenas (IFC, 2012;Villarroya et al, 2014). We propose a comprehensive framework for advancing both biodiversity and ecosystem service mitigation.…”

“…To address these shortcomings, biodiversity mitigation policies and programs are now moving away from site-based, piecemeal mitigation to a scale that can more comprehensively account for cumulative impacts of development within a region (Saenz et al, 2013a, 2013b, Villarroya et al, 2014 and even at a national scale (Kormos et al, 2014). There is general consensus now among researchers and practitioners that biodiversity and ecosystem function mitigation should consider whole systems, anticipate impacts, and proactively recommend compensatory actions Hayes, 2014).…”

“…Ironically, many of the laws that establish mitigation requirements were designed to protect people from environmental degradation associated with development: in other words, to guard against ecosystem service loss (Villarroya et al, 2014). The language in these laws ranges from the general to the specific.…”

What Does the Academic Research Say About Impact Assessment and Environmental Licensing in Brazil?

“…Positive reports in relation to participation of communities are also found in Devlin et al (2005), reviewing cases in which participation led to the abandonment of large-scale, high impact development projects. Villarroya et al (2014) analyzed biodiversity offset policies in Latin American countries. In this study, the authors show that Brazil is one of the countries which has the legal requirements for such offsets, but not a mechanism to previously guarantee the application of the mitigation hierarchy (avoidance, minimization, restoration and offset).…”

Interactions Between Biodiversity Offsets and Protected Area Commitments: Avoiding Perverse Outcomes

“…Offsets that create new protected areas, fund the management of existing protected areas and restore degraded ecosystems are already occurring in many parts of the world (Brownlie and Botha 2009;McKenney and Kiesecker 2010;Bos et al 2014;Villarroya et al 2014). Proponents of the use of offsets as a funding mechanism for achieving such protected area targets point to the slow progress of many nations toward meeting the targets (Watson et al 2014) and the widespread inadequacy of funding for protected area management (McCarthy et al 2012;Githiru et al 2015;Kiesecker et al 2015).…”