Output association: LCNR associated

Biodiversity credits are an emerging vehicle for pro-environmental financing. Here we define and delimit biodiversity credits and explore the pathways through which credits can be issued. We scrutinize early evidence from pilots and suggest lessons from other market-based incentives for conservation and climate mitigation, including biodiversity offsets and forest carbon credits that have attracted large private funding flows, but have been questioned regarding their additionality, permanence, and leakage.

European countries have committed to ambitious upscaling of privately-funded nature conservation activities. We review the status and drivers of biodiversity finance in Europe. By implementing semi-structured interviews with 25 elite biodiversity finance key informants and three focus groups across Europe, we then explore opportunities and challenges for upscaling private investment in nature. We find that opportunities arise from macroeconomic, political and regulatory changes, along with various technological and financial innovations and growing professional experience.

Biodiversity offsetting is a globally influential policy mechanism for reconciling trade-offs between development and biodiversity loss. However, there is little robust evidence of its effectiveness. We evaluated the outcomes of a jurisdictional offsetting policy (Victoria, Australia). Offsets under Victoria’s Native Vegetation Framework (2002–2013) aimed to prevent loss and degradation of remnant vegetation, and generate gains in vegetation extent and quality.

Over the past three decades, China’s government has implemented many projects under its ecological compensation policy, including paying compensation fees for habitat creation to redress natural habitat losses caused by development. However, a critical evaluation of both the policy design and its ecological outcomes, has not previously been carried out. We assemble diverse data sources to provide the first evaluation of China’s eco-compensation policy and practice, identifying several challenges.

We conduct an expert workshop to identify policies for delivering nature recovery in England and perceptions of their feasibility, showing an inverse correlation between experts’ perceptions of policies’ impact at delivering nature recovery, and their feasibility. We then explore how these policies relate to the policy toolkit applied in mission-oriented strategy and demonstrate how missions-thinking can be applied to nature recovery. Many policies proposed fall within the conventional mission-oriented policy toolkit (clearly defining the mission, policy coordination, strategic public procurement, public investment in fundamental innovation and public goods, conditional financing, public engagement).

Biodiversity compensation policies have emerged around the world to address the ecological harms of infrastructure expansion, but they have historically experienced weak compliance. The English government is introducing a requirement that all new infrastructure developments demonstrate they achieve a Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). Previous research has highlighted governance gaps that risk undermining the policy’s ecological outcomes, as well as exploring the risks caused by fundamental capacity constraints in regulators, but the magnitude of their effects on the policy’s potential impacts on biodiversity remains unexplored. We collated BNG information from all new major developments across six early adopter councils from 2020-2022. We quantified the proportion of the biodiversity outcomes promised under BNG which are at risk of non-compliance, explored the variation in strategies that developments use to meet their biodiversity liabilities, and quantified the occurrence of simple errors in the biodiversity metric calculations submitted by project proponents.

Net outcome-type biodiversity policies are proliferating globally as perceived mechanisms to reconcile economic development and conservation objectives. The UK government’s Environment Bill will mandate that most new developments in England demonstrate that they deliver a biodiversity net gain (BNG) to receive planning permission, representing the most wide-ranging net outcome type policy globally. However, as with many nascent net-outcome policies, the likely outcomes of mandatory BNG have not been explored empirically. We assemble all BNG assessments (accounting for ∼6% of England’s annual housebuilding and other infrastructure) submitted from January 2020 to February 2021 in six early-adopter councils who are implementing mandatory no net loss or BNG requirements in advance of the national adoption of mandatory BNG, and analyze the aggregate habitat changes proposed

Achieving “No Net Loss” (NNL) of nature from a development typically requires projects to follow a ‘mitigation hierarchy’, by which biodiversity losses are first avoided wherever possible, then minimised or remediated, and finally any residual impacts offset by conservation activities elsewhere. Biodiversity NNL can significantly affect people, including their cultural values. However, empirical research is lacking on how to incorporate impacts on cultural values of nature into NNL strategies. We use the Bujagali and Isimba Hydropower Projects and Kalagala Offset in Uganda as a case study to explore local people’s perceptions of the importance of cultural heritage to their wellbeing, how the developments affected their cultural heritage, and how these perceived impacts could be incorporated into NNL strategies. We sampled six villages experiencing different levels of hydropower development along the Victoria Nile River. Many river features, particularly rapids and waterfalls, are important cultural sites, associated with spirits and are worshipped by local communities. Spiritual beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, nature, and how cultural heritage is changing were frequently mentioned when respondents described cultural heritage. People perceived cultural heritage to be an important component of their wellbeing, but its importance differed between villages and socio-demographic groups