I think we need to refresh our minds and ask ourselves what and who is driving this. Biodiversity Offsetting is largely driven by developers and not environmental managers. Their motivation is to build at the cheapest cost, greatest profit, as all developers make money before products. The things that drive development are issues such as population, a growing population leads to increased need for infrastructure and housing and the most profitable way to do that is on previously undeveloped land.
Land is finite, there is fixed supply, unless we consider the Netherlands in which case you can occasionally steal some land from the sea. As a rule though land is finite, as developers relentlessly gobble up green land the net area for offsetting reduces and the connectivity of habitats diminished. This damage to habitats at the point of development serves to weaken buffering habitats, devaluing their ecological capacity and coincidently making them viable for development as they become degraded habitats. So the question is when do you stop? Eventually a situation will arise when the offsetting land becomes viable to develop and then where does one offset the previous offset? Over time and after much habitat destruction has taken place the whole concept becomes unsustainable. It’s a thin end of a very bad wedge. As an environmentalist I don’t like the idea of anything being unsustainable. So why are we encouraging a non-sustainable proposal? To say that development is minimal because we have so much other land in the UK ignores other demands on the finite resource. The more I look at a hectare of land the more I see a huge array of demands placed on it; housing, roads, rail, agriculture, forestry, wind farms, solar panels, recreation, sport etc etc. I call it the hectored hectare and as more green field is lost these pressures amplify. We already don’t have enough land.
And should we not be considering that in ever increasingly growing society (both population and needs) that poor quality green space on the urban fringe has a greater value than a SSSI on Shetland? Therefore offsetting needs to fully consider the loss of common, even pest, species from the communities that enjoy the occasional glimpse of a grey squirrel robbing a magpie’s nest! The offsetting should be proportional to the availability of green space particularly in urban settings.
Why are we being led by the developers? Surely we as environmentalists should not be responding defensively to proposals that are developer led. Are we no longer creatively able to lead? There appears to be no alternatives other than the continued and unsustainable loss of green land. I live in a place where there is a derelict mill, left there now for many many years, meanwhile I sit on the local plan committee trying to ‘accommodate’ the need for more housing and the only development that has taken place is on green field. Green field development should be taxed at a rate that stimulates re-use of buildings and brown field. That is the alternative way at looking at Offsetting. To quote Dieter Helm; “[development of green belts] simply compares and contrasts what exists with a proposed development and concludes that because what is can be poor environmental and amenity value, that therefore inevitably concludes it will not be a great loss to concrete over it. This is bad economics and bad planning – and very bad environmental policy.”
