I had a good morning with Biodiversity Minister, Richard Benyon, yesterday. While the weather was a little disappointing, Old Hall Marshes was looking great, hooching with waders and marsh harriers. We discussed some of the challenges we face on the site and set it into the wider Essex/national context. The reserve provided a much better backdrop for our discussion compared to the usual office environment.
Mr Benyon's attention, like all his parliamentary colleagues, will turn today to the Queen's Speech: a moment for pageant and political intent. I'll offer a view on its content tomorrow.
In the meantime, I promised to pick up the offsetting theme continued by Sam Vine yesterday. Sam outlined some of the challenges they are dealing with as biodiversity offsets are rolled out at state and national level (link here). Much of what Sam said resonates with the RSPB’s thoughts, particularly the need to adopt a principled, robust and pragmatic approach to the development of any offset system to ensure that nature does not lose out.
Our interest in offsets is not to facilitate economic growth per se, but to see if they offer a way to stem decades of gradual biodiversity loss to development that has gone on outside our protected areas, with little or no redress. Our starting point is that compensation (or offsetting) is an absolute last resort, once all measures to avoid and reduce possible impacts have been taken, and there is a clear need for the development that justifies damage to our steadily eroding natural capital. We are not alone in wanting to avoid short cuts being taken – the Government’s own National Planning Policy Framework agrees, as does its Natural Capital Committee.
A well regulated, mandatory national system of offsets could offer one possible way of making those fine words a reality. This could ensure, as the NCC’s report suggests, that development no longer leads to the erosion of our natural capital. Designed properly, it could offer more effective ways to provide habitat and species compensation when it is considered necessary, while complementing wider landscape scale conservation and lowering overall costs through economies of scale. However, we do agree with the NCC this should not be rushed in to headlong – that it should be ‘carefully explored after a clear set of principles and a policy framework has been developed.’ Scratch the surface of the biodiversity offset issue and you reveal a complex web of interrelated issues that all need to be got right if the goal of no net loss of biodiversity is to be achieved for real, rather than on paper. Careful thought and real political will, based on robust science, is needed to implement an offset system worthy of the lofty ambitions often claimed for it.
Comparing the situations here and in Australia reveals some interesting similarities and some real differences. The first is that a successful offsets scheme relies upon there being the political and social will to meet no net loss of biodiversity. This means having strict rules about what has to be offset, when, and how it is done. At the same time, accepting that it will often not be possible to replace a lost habitat or species, so damaging development in the wrong place should not proceed.
But there are real differences that, in some ways, makes developing and implementing offsets in here more complex. For example, unlike Australia, we do not have significant areas of native vegetation where little intervention and cost would be required beyond getting the habitat to a point where it can be left alone. Our rich heritage of semi-natural habitats means knowledge of how to restore or create the conditions required by many habitats and species is still in its infancy and largely experimental. As in Australia, sound science is essential. Simply increasing the area of replacement habitat by five or ten fold and hoping it will work cannot make up for the permanent loss of valued biodiversity. Even where we do know how to guarantee success, there is normally a need for continuing active intervention which brings with it associated costs over the course of decades.
So, we wait to see how the Coalition Government wishes to take forward its current work on biodiversity offsets in England. The RSPB will continue to give serious thought to this issue that at one and the same time offers real opportunity for, and considerable risk to, the conservation of the natural world around us.
It is excellent that there is good dialogue between the RSPB and the Government. This has to be an absolute "MUST" if stemming biodiversity loss is to have a chance of succeeding. I do sometimes wonder though, that while Richard Benyon may be well intentioned on this front, whether, with Mr Paterson sitting above him and to a much greter extent Mr Osborne above him, if it is really in Mr Benyon's power to "deliver the goods". In the final analysis it boils down to whether this Government as a whole really has the will to assist and help nature. I have to say going on the evidence of their actions, this is very doubtful. In making this comment this does not deminish in any way the need for dialogue and the RSPB is doing a brilliant job in this area.
redkite