Estimating the benefits of offsetting: Expert elicitation

Project 5.1 Effective offsets policy requires data on the costs and benefits of on-ground management actions to be readily available to decision makers. However, a key challenge of estimating the benefits of offsets is that this information is often difficult to obtain. Very few historical offset projects in Australia have been evaluated to determine the resulting benefit. Even for other types of conservation projects, data on actual biodiversity outcomes (rather than the inputs, such as the number of trees planted) are frequently lacking. One reason for this lack of information upon which to base decisions is that significant funding is required to monitor and evaluate conservation actions, over the longer-term.