Workshop Outcomes - National Biodiversity Offsets Conference

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Description

In August this year the EIANZ organised a 2 day conference to explore the current state of offsetting in Australia, in particular, the conference allowed participants to

  • Discuss their history and effectiveness in addressing environmental impacts;

  • Share the experiences from all levels of government;

  • Learn from academics, the legal fraternity and those involved in offset markets;

  • Hear from individuals involved in the hands-on delivery of offsets;

  • Explore different metrics for measuring impact and calculating offset delivery; and

  • Debate the relative benefits of direct, indirect and ‘pay and go’ offsets.

A key part of the conference was a workshop at the end which was aimed at identifying priorities for biodiversity offsets into the future by addressing this question “Where do we want to be with offsetting?” 

Three broad outcomes resulted:

  • Addressing the broad question by jurisdiction;

  • Addressing the broad question at a higher strategic level; and

  • Developing a consensus Conference Statement about the state of offsetting and how best to progress its practice in the future to ensure biodiversity outcomes are further enhanced.

I was the facilitator for this workshop, and the principal author of the report that described the workshop outcomes. You can download a full copy of the report by clicking on this link - full report

The session addressing offsets by jurisdiction were set the following 3 questions to guide participants to answer the overall workshop question:

  1. What is being done well?

  2. What areas need work?

  3. What do we need to do to make offsetting better?

The full report provides the outcomes of these deliberations.

The following broad question was posed for the strategic part of the workshop: “What can we do to improve the practice of offsetting and the offsetting community?” As a guide, the following four topics were proposed to guide the discussions:

  1. Knowledge gaps,

  2. Expertise gaps

  3. Key elements of best practice

  4. High level barriers to better practice.

The 7 topics that emerged from this part of the workshop were:

  1. Better education of, and communication with, key stakeholders to improve understanding of offsets and their benefits and reduce misunderstandings – landholders, finance institutions (offsets have value), other government agencies.

  2. Provide sufficient and flexible funding and resources for follow-up – management, management plans, compliance, auditing, monitoring of the offsets including oversight and expertise and ability to be adaptive and are outcomes being achieved and are they what is wanted, develop evaluation cycle.

  3. Develop a consistent overarching framework/guidance that can be applied, including standardisation where appropriate, consistent use of terminology – principles not methods.

  4. Greater use of, and resources for, strategic offsets including for connectivity benefits, and at landscape scale, having metrics that deliver both local and strategic outcomes.

  5. More professional forums and discussions including sharing of expertise across and between jurisdictions, and the development of good practice case studies, for example monitoring, adaptive management, strategic approaches. Development of a nation-wide community of practice.

  6. Incentives for landowners – using market credits, better education about conservation outcomes, and establish under a regulation/legislation, greater financial certainty, financial support for surveys.

  7. Improved transparency, accountability and consistency – methodology, risk, weightings, losses and gains, reporting, and regulation independent of government.

The final part of the workshop was dedicated to producing a conference statement. 

Statement from the 2019 EIANZ National Biodiversity Offsets Conference held in Canberra

Biodiversity offsetting has evolved considerably over time, and will continue to do so. Conference delegates strongly support the continual improvement of biodiversity offsetting policy and practice by addressing the following seven matters:

  1. Proponents of all development proposals likely to have impacts on biodiversity should continue to demonstrate that every effort has been made to both avoid and minimise environmental impacts

  2. Offsets exist to maintain or improve the conservation, protection and ecological health of the affected biodiversity.  Implementation models and mechanisms must never deprioritise or compromise this.

  3. Offsets should apply to all sectors where residual environmental impacts on biodiversity occur 

  4. Strategic biodiversity offsets are preferred over ad hoc offsetting as they are more likely to deliver better biodiversity outcomes;

  5. All stakeholders, including financial institutions and landowners, need to be better informed about the costs, benefits and obligations of developing and maintaining biodiversity offsets throughout their lifecycle;

  6. A nationally consistent and agreed set of principles that guide biodiversity offsetting, including those for monitoring and measuring effectiveness, is required; and

  7. Public accessibility, transparency and accountability of offsetting processes must be lifted to a higher standard.