Biodiversity Offsets: Views, Experience, and the Business Case

By Kerry ten Kate, Josh Bishop, Ricardo Bayon

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Biodiversity1 offsets are conservation activities intended to compensate for the residual, unavoidable harm to biodiversity caused by development projects. Recent experience with
regulatory regimes, such as wetland and conservation banking in the USA, tradable forest
conservation obligations in Brazil and habitat compensation requirements in Australia, Canada
and the EU, has been supplemented by growing interest in the potential of voluntary biodiversity
offsets. This experience suggests that biodiversity offsets may be of value to business,
government, local communities and conservation groups alike.