Ensuring better offsets for threatened species and biodiversity

Martine Maron, Megan Evans, Tida Nou, Helen Mayfield and Jeremy Simmonds present their expertise on ensuring better offsets for threatened species and biodiversity. Governments and proponents of development are increasingly turning to compensatory mechanisms, such as offsets, to counterbalance unavoidable biodiversity and ecosystem service impacts from development. Biodiversity offsetting involves counterbalancing a loss of biodiversity from a development impact with an equivalent biodiversity gain. However, compensatory approaches remain controversial, and their adoption needs to be underpinned by robust evidence if they are to deliver the biodiversity outcomes and regulatory certainty that they promise. This presentation showcases the new tools, resources, and guidelines developed by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub to strengthen the design and implementation of biodiversity offsets and to help ensure they deliver at least no net loss outcomes.