The US government in general is unaware of the UK’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) policy, the executive director of a policy-focused company has claimed.
There is “so little US government awareness” of BNG, Tim Male, executive director at Washington DC-headquartered Environmental Policy Innovation Center said during a webinar on the policy hosted by his organisation.
“One of our goals is to keep talking about the UK policy and England’s specific approach to it. So many businesses are looking at ways to assess their footprint and come up with ways to benefit biodiversity that match their footprint,” Male said in response to a question from Carbon Pulse.
The law, which comes into force in November, means that any new developments across England and Wales will need to prove a 10% net gain in biodiversity as a condition of planning permission.
Developments will be able to sell credits from their nature gains, first introduced as part of the 2021 Environment Act, but the system of statutory biodiversity credits will initially allow the UK government to sell units to developers if the required net gains cannot be achieved on-site or through the off-site market.
“The crediting system you [in the UK] have developed has got some pretty universal applicability in the US and a simplicity of implementation that our policies lack.
“Eventually the global investment policies are going to move so fast in this direction [requiring measuring biodiversity] that people in the US are going to realise … we need to know what’s going on here,” Male added.
The UK government is working on a biodiversity metric that will be made available when BNG becomes mandatory.
This metric, which aims to quantify losses or gains in biodiversity, will help to show the public that “nature is better off” with “positive framing … we struggle with that in the US”, Male said.
“A lot of areas of US policy you have to ask an individual human, what do you think? And they just make up an answer.”
The UK has “come up with a system that allows people to see the math, so I think it has a lot of reliability, validation built into it that we really hope to see take off”, he said.
“It’s really an amazing system that can value impacts and gains for many habitat types. Yes, the trade-off for having a near universal system is some inaccuracy, but it’s a dramatic improvement on the US system where we have 100+ methods just for wetlands and streams.”
“[The UK system] is a lot more likely to be fully implemented and improved over time,” he predicted.
Alicia Gibson, senior associate director at UK advisor Finance Earth, told Carbon Pulse she would like to see the US build on the lessons from BNG in its own schemes.
“A consistent and robust method to biodiversity measurement, effective monitoring and regulation of BNG delivery, and sector capacity building are really important to ensure BNG policy delivers nature recovery at scale,” she said. Finance Earth is launching a nature-based solutions blended finance fund in the UK in a venture with seed funding from the country’s government.
Challenges around BNG include the risk of organisations “gaming the metric – delivering the wrong kind of habitat rather than the best, most suitable habitat”, she said.
This could happen if developers prioritise “biodiversity unit value” using the BNG metric over “the actual biodiversity and species mix and ecological connectivity”, said Gibson.
“[BNG’s] measurement approach is very narrow. It relies on an ecological qualitative assessment of key features like the condition and the type of habitat, and it projects then what could potentially be delivered over 30 years, without necessarily much certainty.”
“It doesn’t look at some of the wider factors that are really important in biodiversity, such as species abundance – that’s where other quantification methods [can] come in.”
Full details of the metric can be found on the Natural England website.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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