The FOEI report referred to in this story was originally published in 2019
Biodiversity offsetting is failing to protect nature while enabling companies to carry out environmental destruction and human rights violations, a report has warned.
Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), a grassroots not-for-profit environmental federation comprised of 70 national member groups, this week published a report authored by Jutta Kill that highlights the risks of nature compensation.
“Offsetting schemes undermine environmental protection by giving companies an opportunity to ignore pollution limits or nature protection rules at any particular place of interest to them while claiming that they are respecting environmental protection laws,” the report, titled “Regulated destruction”, said.
Biodiversity offsetting refers to measures taken outside a licensed location to cancel out the environmental impact that the company and licensing agency consider unavoidable. Such markets have been implemented in numerous jurisdictions around the world, but remain controversial.
“This assumption allows a company to exceed a pollution limit or circumvent a prohibition to destroy at any one particular place it wants for corporate profit-making,” the report said.
According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the number of countries with government policies on biodiversity offsets has doubled in the past 15 years, from 60 countries in 2000 to 115 countries in 2017.
As the global voluntary biodiversity credit market emerges, participants have stressed that voluntary credits should not be used for offsetting purposes, though critics say it would be difficult for the market to achieve scale without it.
The offset process requires evidence that ecological functions and biological diversity equivalent to those destroyed have been restored or protected elsewhere – which is problematic when it comes to nature and ecosystems.
“Nature is shaped by a highly volatile set of social and biophysical relations and processes, and by complex systems of use and access rights that are specific to a particular place. Trying to force this volatile and dynamic web into neatly packageable and tradable ‘service’ units risks breaking existing (subsistence and customary) relationships and local economies,” the report highlighted.
According to FOEI, there are several negative outcomes driven by the practice of biodiversity offsetting, such as:
- Further destruction of natural places
- Perverse incentives
- Increased pollution
- Undermining human rights
“Local communities are often not allowed to access land that is declared a biodiversity offset, even if they hold customary rights to it. There is ample evidence of human rights abuses when communities try to defend these customary rights,” the report claimed.
Impacts on local communities are already happening, according to FOEI. In Madagascar, people are restricted from cultivating cassava in the forest area that is part of a biodiversity offset by mining multinational Rio Tinto, international NGOs, and the government authority.
Madagascar’s mining projects have been dubbed “unsustainable” by Canadian academics in a paper published in The Extractive Industries and Societies, as restricting activities such as gathering and hunting can deprive locals of a source of income.
By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com
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