The Australian government hopes private investors will help save nature. Here's how its scheme could fail
This week’s federal budget reiterated the government’s plan to establish a new scheme for encouraging private investment in conservation, called a biodiversity market (now, rebranded to a “nature repair” market).
A biodiversity market would see landholders granted certificates for restoring or managing local habitats. Landholders could then sell these certificates to, for instance, businesses.
But the effectiveness of such schemes overseas and in Australia can at best be described as mixed. Whether biodiversity markets can actually improve the dire trajectory of our native plants and animals depends heavily on two things:
In submissions to the recent public consultation on the proposed market, we and other experts argued the scheme should explicitly rule out the use of certificates as compliance offsets for biodiversity damage. Here, we give three major reasons why this is important.
The government hopes private investors will help save nature. Here's how its scheme could fail
This week’s federal budget reiterated the government’s plan to establish a new scheme for encouraging private investment in conservation, called a biodiversity market (now, rebranded to a “nature repair” market).
A biodiversity market would see landholders granted certificates for restoring or managing local habitats. Landholders could then sell these certificates to, for instance, businesses.
But the effectiveness of such schemes overseas and in Australia can at best be described as mixed. Whether biodiversity markets can actually improve the dire trajectory of our native plants and animals depends heavily on two things:
- whether they reward environmental stewardship, which delivers overall benefits for biodiversity or
- whether they rely on the use of “offsets”, and the loss of biodiversity elsewhere, to generate market demand.
In submissions to the recent public consultation on the proposed market, we and other experts argued the scheme should explicitly rule out the use of certificates as compliance offsets for biodiversity damage. Here, we give three major reasons why this is important.
The government hopes private investors will help save nature. Here's how its scheme could fail