We asked landholders how they feel about biodiversity offsets — and the NSW government has a lot to learn

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Roel Plant, University of Technology Sydney and Laure-Elise Ruoso, University of Technology SydneyWhen land is cleared to make room for urban growth, infrastructure, mining, and so on, developers are often required to “offset” their environmental damage by improving biodiversity elsewhere. This could mean, for example, planting trees along a river, or building shelters for animals that lost their habitats.

In New South Wales, one mechanism to fulfil this requirement is the Biodiversity Offsets Scheme, and a NSW parliamentary inquiry into this scheme is currently underway. The inquiry will look into the scheme’s administration, transparency and oversight, and will investigate the ability for private landowners to engage in it.

This is where our research comes in. We interviewed landholders in Greater Metropolitan Sydney during 2019 and 2020 to find out if they can — and want to — participate in biodiversity offsets.

Our findings suggest the NSW government would be wise to open up its offset scheme to make it more equitable, diverse and socially acceptable.

Recent controversies

Australia is considered an international forerunner when it comes to biodiversity offsetting, with all Australian states and territories having some form in place (complemented by federal provisions).

But over the years, biodiversity offset schemes have been marred with controversy, particularly recently.

In April, The Guardian Australia revealed a single company had made more than A$40 million by buying land and then selling offsets on that land to the state and federal governments. The new inquiry is a direct response to this news report.

How landholders come into it

Landholders are essential to making biodiversity offsets successful. They play a pivotal role in how offsetting functions on the ground, and in safeguarding its outcomes.

For example, landholder work could involve removing stock, weed control, pest fauna management, fencing off the site or building nest boxes for birds whose trees were cut down.

To get involved in biodiversity offsetting in NSW, landholders must first enter an agreement with the government to enhance and maintain the biodiversity values of their land, in perpetuity.

They often generate a one-off profit when they enter the agreement, and receive yearly payments from the government to manage their land. These payments are funded by, for instance, developers and mining companies, who have been required under law to offset their developments.

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Artificial refuges are a popular stopgap for habitat destruction, but the science isn’t up to scratch

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But while it’s been shown biodiversity offsets readily meet developers’ needs, the diverse perspectives of landholders remain poorly understood.

This knowledge gap is what inspired us to undertake research with landholders in Greater Sydney. This included conducting interviews with landholders and land managers, both participants and non-participants in the scheme.

Can landholders participate?

Four factors determined whether landholders participated in the scheme: experience, financial and staff resources, access to information and technical support, and property size.

Several participants had a good understanding of the scheme because of prior experience or involvement. Some had access to financial and staff resources (such as lawyers and property managers), while others were given information and technical support.

Having support like this gave them confidence to enter into an agreement and manage the land appropriately. One landholder told us:

I think I knew enough people who’d done it to know that they’d got through all of that [management of the land] without too much concern.

In contrast, landholders unable to participate generally didn’t have experience, resources, support or large properties. They often relied on online information and had a poor understanding of the scheme. They had many concerns, especially financial. One barrier they identified, for example, is the cost of the initial ecological assessment of the land.

A non-participant said:

We don’t want to outline money for something that we don’t really understand or know anything about and might not happen.

Do landholders want to participate?

A variety of ethical, financial, technical and governance-related factors influenced a landholders’ willingness to participate in offsets. Some don’t consider nature as something that can be substituted, and fundamentally disagreed with the very principles of offsets:

We shouldn’t be clearing [t]here and then growing stuff here. We just shouldn’t be clearing there.

Others consider the rules of the scheme not stringent enough to achieve positive ecological outcomes. Some have reservations about their technical ability to do the conservation work, and question the likelihood of “nature complying” with stated ecological outcomes.

Some landholders seek compensation only for their conservation actions — in other words, making a profit isn’t their goal. For others, the prospect of a profit is a determining factor, with some hesitant to participate because it would take away from potentially more lucrative property development options:

I suspect there’ll be rezoning of land and all sorts of things, so if we do [offsetting] we’re going to lose that potential.

And some landholders perceive participation, in perpetuity, interferes with their right to sell their land. They see the scheme as potentially diminishing the land value, or putting unnecessary burden on the next landowner.

Building artificial refuges like nest boxes is a popular offsetting project.
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What needs to change?

These findings tell us two things about the current scheme:

1. financial and information barriers create unequal opportunities across landholders
2. the scheme doesn’t cater to diverse conservation perspectives.

The NSW government should loosen up the narrow neo-liberal market principles underpinning the scheme and open it up to a wider range of landholders. As an immediate first step, the government could introduce a more equitable model for sharing the costs of the initial ecological assessment.

It could also open the scheme to a wider range of conservation perspectives.

Offsetting is meant to be used as a last resort, according to globally accepted standards for development projects.

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Read more:
Can we really restore or protect natural habitats to ‘offset’ those we destroy?

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If developers and the government clearly demonstrate habitat destruction is completely necessary and offsetting really is a last resort, then we expect broader acceptance among landholders. Further research is required to learn how the government could achieve this.

Such reforms would give the scheme a stronger social license to operate and ensure it meets its policy objectives better.

Importantly, opening up the scheme would make it more transparent, so that future excessive profit seeking, with questionable conservation outcomes, can be prevented.

Roel Plant, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology Sydney and Laure-Elise Ruoso, Senior Research Consultant, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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NZ’s environmental watchdog challenges climate policy on farm emissions and forestry offsets

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has warned that afforestation is a risky approach to combatting climate change.
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Ivan Diaz-Rainey, University of Otago

The greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, from burping and urinating livestock, account for about half of New Zealand’s total emissions. These agricultural emissions have been the elephant in the room of New Zealand climate policy for some time.

A report released by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) this week suggests New Zealand should treat biological emissions differently from carbon dioxide emissions. It also says afforestation is a risky approach to combating climate change if planting trees is used to offset carbon emissions.

The report threatens to turn environmental policy and its principal policy tool, the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS), on its head.

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A new approach to emissions trading in a post-Paris climate

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Emissions trading in New Zealand

New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme, established by Helen Clark’s Labour administration in 2008, was meant to be a bold first in the world. It was going to cover all greenhouse-gases and all sectors and include forestry as an emissions sink. Critically, it was to include agriculture and the related biological emissions.

But the election of John Key’s National administration in 2009, with their rural electorate, meant agriculture never entered the scheme and was therefore “given a free ride” in the decade or so since. To put this “free ride” into context, the rest of the economy could buy cheap, and in some cases dubious, international carbon units for the bulk of that period.

After international trading was stopped, they could buy relatively cheap domestic forestry units. In truth, it was never much of a free ride for agriculture since no one was working particularly hard to mitigate anyhow.

The PCE report challenges the scheme’s architecture. It makes a number of recommendations. First, it suggests that biological emission should be treated differently to carbon dioxide emissions, with a zero target on carbon dioxide and a much lower but unspecified target for biological emissions.

The second recommendation is to no longer allow forestry sinks to be used to offset carbon dioxide emission, but to continue using them to offset biological emission.

This shifts the burden of mitigation away from biological emissions in agriculture towards carbon dioxide emissions from energy use and transport.

The PCE’s recommendations

The report provides an alternative vision to the “all gasses and all sectors” flexibility envisioned for the original NZ ETS. It differentiates between carbon dioxide and biological emissions since carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas, but biological emissions include the long-lived nitrous oxide and the shorter-lived but potent methane.

The recommendation that afforestation sinks should no longer be used to offset carbon dioxide emissions represent a radical departure. It is likely to be opposed by foresters and those not wanting to create too much uncertainty in the NZ ETS. These are fair points that must be balanced against the logic behind the recommendation.

Using afforestation to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions is risky because forests may burn down (especially in a warming world) and release the carbon again. Commercial plantation forests only hold the carbon until the next harvesting cycle, and ultimately the land available for tree planting is limited and may crowd out other land uses.

Using afforestation to tackle carbon dioxide reductions also means we do not work hard enough to decarbonise the economy in more fundamental ways, including switching to electric vehicles, building houses for passive solar heating and making process heat renewable.

The search for cross-party consensus

Overall, the report signals a fundamentally different approach to climate policy from that envisioned for the NZ ETS over a decade ago. Differentiating carbon and biological emissions is sensible both from a science and a political expediency perspective.

The latter is particularly important if we are to have a political consensus behind the proposed Zero Carbon Act. Ultimately, the opposition National party will not back anything that unduly affects its agricultural electorate. Reducing reliance on carbon sinks also seems sensible as it pushes the cost of mitigation into the future, imposing it on future generations.

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A fresh start for climate change mitigation in New Zealand

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Does this mean a free ride for agriculture once more? Probably not, but the devil will be in the detail. What the reduction targets for biological emissions should be is not clear. The report cites a range of between 22% to 48% by 2050 as potentially feasible with investment in research and development.

The degree to which afforestation can be used to offset agricultural emissions also needs to be thought about. Unlimited forestry offsets could lead to landscapes that are either planted in trees or relatively intensive dairy farming, with little else in between. This is undesirable as it could lead to changes in biological diversity and water quality and ultimately damage New Zealand’s green and clean brand.

Clearly, there needs to be strong incentives to reduce biological emissions beyond the offset option that push towards more sustainable forms of farming. There is a strong case to limit offsets for agriculture as well, but this might depress the forestry sector.

Finally, to remove the carbon offset option from the market immediately or in the next few years would be unfair to foresters and companies that have been planning to use offsets based on the current architecture. A transition period would be needed to lessen the regulatory shock.

Ivan Diaz-Rainey, Associate Professor of Finance & Director, Climate and Energy Finance Group, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.