Suchergebnisse

In biodiversity offsetting, developers are permitted to degrade an ecosystem and its species in exchange for "offsetting" the damage elsewhere. The practice, albeit controversial, is rapidly spreading as a proposed win-win solution that allows biodiversity and development to coexist. In this article, I explore best practices for how the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and South Africa structure their laws to turn species and their habitats into fungible commodities to be traded like Pokémon cards. I analyze how different jurisdictions regulate the temporal dimension of biodiversity offsetting: when must offset requirements be completed (e.g., before or after the original destruction is allowed), and for how long to must the offset be maintained? I examine the spatial requirements: e.g., how far from the original destruction must or may the offset be? I look at the type of trades that are allowed: for example, must the "replacement" entity be the same as the entity that is destroyed or degraded? Finally, I examine who must do what to make sure the offset is sustained. In analyzing how jurisdictions arrange these variables, I provide examples that others might or might not wish to adapt. Furthermore, how these variables are legally mandated helps us understand how a nation, a state, or a community understands its relationship with the natural world, and what that portends for the future of human/non-human interactions. How polities strike that balance will be reflected by the specific choices they make not only to allow offsetting in the first place, but in the ways they stack the variables to ensure (or not) species and ecosystem viability in the short term and long term. I conclude by explaining how well-structured, carefully implemented and monitored biodiversity offsetting could be part of our conservation toolkit for the Anthropocene era. But to implement biodiversity offsetting in a deeply equitable way will be expensive, difficult, and require a cadre of dedicated stakeholders committed to sustainable human and nonhuman communities.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages America's public lands for a multiplicity of uses and values. This effort requires difficult tradeoffs, because allowing one use, like oil drilling, will displace others, like recreation or wildlife habitat. Compensatory mitigation—the practice of requiring land users to offset their environmental harms—provides an important mechanism for addressing use conflicts, by enabling intensive development in designated areas, while conserving the ecological integrity of public lands as a whole. Despite its potential to balance competing interests in public lands, compensatory mitigation has come under fire. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke described compensatory mitigation as "un-American" and "extortion," and under his leadership, the BLM disclaimed authority to require it, never mind that the agency had done so for decades. The policy has persisted under the leadership of Secretary David Bernhardt. This Article examines the history of public land law, the development of environmental mitigation policies across the federal government, and three interlocking provisions of Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976—the Multiple Use Mandate, the Land Use Planning Mandate, and the Anti-Degradation Mandate—to reveal that the BLM has ample authority to require compensatory mitigation. It then assesses the circumstances in which resource users can appropriately be required to offset the impacts of their uses.

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation. Analyzing optimal contracts for forest carbon sequestration, an important offset category, we conduct a national-scale simulation using results from an econometric model of land-use change. The results indicate that for an increase in forest area of 50 million acres, annual government expenditures with optimal contracts are about $4 billion lower compared than under a uniform subsidy.

Offsets generated by projects for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation ("REDD") is a particularly controversial form of carbon offset. Excluded from the Kyoto Protocol mechanisms, REDD offsets are now making a comeback ever since the Bali Action Plan specifically referred to REDD. Most recently, the Copenhagen Accord recognized the crucial role of REDD and the need to enhance removals of GHG emissions by forests and agreed on the need to provide incentives to such actions to enable the mobilization of financial resources from developed countries.4 It would seem therefore that the issuance and trade of REDD offsets may finds its way into the evolving international climate change regime. The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether the issuance REDD offsets is an effective climate change mitigation measure.5 In other words: Are REDD offsets really green? Based on this evaluation, the paper also aims to provide recommendations on the content of national legislation for REDD offsets.