https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/publications/new-tricks-biodiversity-offsetting-and-mining
Our new report with Friends of the Earth :
Governments and businesses are presenting biodiversity offsetting as a nature conservation solution. However, in a new report Friends of the Earth and the Andrew Lees Trust UK show that it’s just a green makeover for more damage by mining and development schemes, especially in some of the world’s most fragile nature hotspots.
Summary
From Madagascar to middle England this report by Friends of the Earth and the Andrew Lees TrustUK exposes how harmful mining, development projects and infrastructure schemes are deploying ‘biodiversity offsetting’ as a new form of conservation action in an effort to maintain business as usual activities.
Developers, industries and their lobbyists are using offsetting to mask the damaging effects of their largely unreformed activities and to further persuade governments, academic bodies, parts of the conservation sector and communities on the ground that their activities can be trusted to be clean, green, fair and sustainable.
Behind the promises and the allure of biodiversity offsetting as an apparent solution to nature’s decline, New frontiers, new tricks finds that the makeover of offsetting is just the latest sustainability gloss for unreformed, fundamentally unsustainable industrial activity and poorly conceived development.
Biodiversity offsetting is no substitute for lasting changes in business and industrial practices and for proper investment in proven nature conservation action to reverse the decline of nature and natural ecosystems……