The variety and abundance of life on earth is astounding, beautiful — and essential to us all. We rely on biodiversity for medicines, food, and countless other useful products, but also to regulate natural processes: biodiversity is needed to purify the air we breathe, pollinate crops, create and stabilize soil, protect us from floods and disasters, and help us adapt to climate change.

But there’s a problem: As the 2019 IPBES report shows, species are going extinct at an alarming rate – about 1,000 times faster than they would naturally. Drivers include the construction of roads, dams, mines, oil and gas installations, residential and commercial buildings, and the spread of industrial agricultural, to name just a few.

Yet, our society relies on these activities for goods, services, and a thriving economy. So, how can we balance conservation and development objectives and promote economic activities that increase, rather than decimate, biodiversity?

Forest Trends has worked with partners around the world for over a decade to make that happen:

  • Through the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP)Forest Trends established and led a group of over 100 companies, government agencies, financial institutions, conservation NGOs and experts. BBOP helped companies with biodiversity impacts (infrastructure developers, extractive industries, commodity agriculture, etc) and governments plan to achieve “no net loss” of biodiversity, and preferably a “net gain”. The BBOP tools offer ways to avoid, minimize, restore and offset (or compensate) the inevitable impacts the development of such projects in a given area. BBOP developed a widely used standard to help project developers manage the biodiversity-related risks of their projects by providing guidance for offsetting biodiversity loss and also by helping to determine the quality and success of these efforts.
  • Forest Trends’ Biodiversity Initiative worked directly with governments and companies to apply this approach, for example through modifying Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) requirements and national policies so they aim for no net loss (or even a net gain) of biodiversity and helping with regional planning. We assisted businesses at the site and corporate levels to manage risk and opportunity by addressing their biodiversity impacts and dependencies.
  • Forest Trends has also partnered with EPA and USDA to identify and understand key market trends for environmental markets around species and habitat conservation across United States.

Governance and Policy for Biodiversity

Governments face the twin challenge of implementing large-scale development projects that will build their economies and deliver services that satisfy basic needs, while simultaneously protecting the environment.  Historically, many governments have not fully recognized and integrated the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in their decision making. They have also not understood the benefits of policies that allow economic development while promoting sustainability and the rights of local communities.  But this is changing, and in recent years, we have seen an increase in governments working towards environmentally sustainable development. Over the last decade, Forest Trends’ Biodiversity Initiative has directly engaged with more than 20 governments to help them develop projects that do not result in a loss of biodiversity (No Net Loss) and explore lower-impact models of resource extraction, infrastructure development, and commodity production, for example as part of the COMBO project which works with governments in Guinea, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Uganda.

This increase in government action is bolstered by a growing societal expectation that governments, working with civil society, must hold companies with a significant biodiversity impact to a higher standard.

Forest Trends’ Biodiversity Initiative provides policy and technical advice as well as capacity building, to governments as they seek to implement sustainable infrastructure projects. We do so by:

  • Assisting governments (including Ministries of the Environment, Mining, Energy, Finance, Agriculture, Planning, and Justice) in the development and use of a roadmap to achieve a Net Gain (NG), or increase, in biodiversity.
  • Supporting the development and implementation of government strategies for No Net Loss or Net Gain (NNL/NG) of biodiversity. These strategies typically cover regulations, policy and technical guidelines.
  • Conducting policy gap analyses tailored to specific countries, provinces and regions, and providing advice on the advantages and disadvantages of different options in order to embed NNL/NG in the policy framework.
  • Preparing data sets and spatially explicit plans and maps to support planning for No Net Loss or Net Gain biodiversity strategies.
  • Producing guidelines on offset design and implementation.
  • Capacity building and training of staff responsible for designing and administering biodiversity mitigation systems, land-use planning, and permitting.
  • Helping governments build the financial resources and technical capacity to implement these systems.

For example:

  • Our work to support the government of Sabah
  • The COMBO project, our partnership with WCS and Biotope, with support from AFD, FFEM and the Mava Foundation

The Private Sector and Biodiversity

When a company’s development activities affect biodiversity negatively, the business faces potentially significant regulatory, financial, operational and reputational risks. Governments, financial institutions, and civil society increasingly expect developers to take responsibility for such impacts and mitigate them. Avoiding, minimizing and restoring impacts on the project site are the first steps in what is referred to as the “mitigation hierarchy”. Remaining impacts can be compensated for-or “offset”-through positive conservation actions nearby to balance the residual impacts. As the last step, biodiversity offsets enable companies to demonstrate that overall, their development activities result in no net loss of biodiversity or preferably a net gain.  (Some biodiversity may be lost, but an equal or greater amount is restored elsewhere.) By following this process, a project developer can also improve outcomes for local communities and manage risks.

Forest Trends advises leading companies in the mining, energy, infrastructure, tourism, commodity agriculture, and forestry sectors at various stages of their efforts to prevent, minimize, and offset their impacts on biodiversity. These companies see the value in forging good relationships with regulators and stakeholders by adhering to internationally recognized best management practices for biodiversity. These experiences are helping to shape the regulatory requirements for conserving biodiversity increasingly being developed by governments. Forward-thinking companies are important allies in the effort to demonstrate practical solutions that balance conversation and economic develop goals.

As biodiversity is infinitely variable, it would be inappropriate to have a global market for offsetting biodiversity (which would require the existence of a standard product), but there are, on a smaller scale, national and regional markets for particular components of biodiversity, such as wetland banking in the United States. Forest Trends provides a periodic overview of the current global state of play of these various biodiversity offset and compensation markets. In collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture, we have also worked on a series of maps that lay out the key market trends in species and habitat conservation across the United States.

Corporate Natural Capital Accounting

Strong and resilient economies depend on healthy natural ecosystems. They rely on natural resources (water, soil, plants) as well as on the services they provide (pollination, erosion control, and others). Together, these goods and services are often referred to as “natural capital”. While companies worldwide have started to think about how to account for the impact on our natural capital and set objectives to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, these efforts are not yet well integrated. In addition, businesses are increasingly aware of their dependencies upon natural capital but have focused more on water and carbon than on biodiversity. As a result, there are few effective tools available that allow businesses to plan and account for biodiversity in their operations as part of their work on natural capital.

Forest Trends and its partners are working to correct this by developing and piloting methods for projects to demonstrate no loss or preferably a net gain in biodiversity within a Corporate Natural Capital Accounting (CNCA) framework.  This approach places metrics for biodiversity alongside monetary values, helping companies to demonstrate how they account for their impacts on natural capital especially with respect to biodiversity.