Comment: Stop the misuse of biodiversity
offsets
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NATURE
Embargo
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London: Wednesday 22 July 2015 18:00 (BST)
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New York: Wednesday 22 July 2015 13:00 (EDT)
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Tokyo: Thursday 23 July 2015 02:00 (JST)
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Sydney: Thursday 23 July 2015 03:00 (AEST)
Governments should not be using the compensation that developers pay for damaging
biodiversity to meet existing conservation targets, argue Martine Maron, James Watson and
colleagues in aNature Comment piece.
Governments are increasingly realising that money generated by offsets could be used to
achieve existing conservation commitments. For instance, developers of a copper mine in
Panama’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor will contribute to the costs of managing two existing
national parks and a new protected area nearby to compensate for the loss of forest. The
Panamanian government can list these parks when reporting progress toward the country’s
previously agreed conservation targets without having to declare the damage to biodiversity
caused by the mine.
A draft report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on biodiversity
offsetting is expected in October. Maron, Watson and co-authors say that it is crucial that the
IUCN provides “clear rules on the use of offsetting”. They recommend that future international
conservation agreements explicitly require separate accounting of protected-area outcomes
achieved through offsets. If governments “renege on their existing commitments by stealth,”
offsets could “cause more harm than good,” conclude the authors.
In another Comment piece, Andrew Skidmore, Nathalie Pettorelli and colleagues call on
ecologists and space agencies to collaborate on a global strategy for monitoring Earth’s
biodiversity from space. Currently, different countries track different biodiversity variables, such
as habitat types and ecosystem functions, inconsistently. The authors propose quantities, such
as vegetation height and leaf area, that can be derived consistently from satellite data and used
to monitor deforestation and biodiversity loss across the globe.
Article and author details
1. Stop misuse of biodiversity offsets
Corresponding Authors
Martine Maron (University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia)
Tel: +61 417 110 537; E-mail: m.maron@uq.edu.au
James Watson (Wildlife Conservation Society and University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Australia)
Tel: +61 409 185 592; E-mail: jwatson@wcs.org
DOI
10.1038/523401a
Online paper*
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/523401a
2. Agree on biodiversity metrics to track from space
Corresponding Authors
Andrew Skidmore (ITC University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands)
E-mail: a.k.skidmore@utwente.nl
Nathalie Pettorelli (Zoological Society of London, UK)
Please contact this author via:
Nicola Manomaiudom (Senior Press Officer, Zoological Society of London)
Tel: +44 20 7449 6246; E-mail: nicola.manomaiudom@zsl.org
DOI
10.1038/523403a
Online paper*
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/523403a
* Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).