Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-tbj44 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T22:00:54.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of the Australian environmental offsets policy: from theory to practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2015

KATHERINE L. MILLER ,
JAMES A. TREZISE ,
STEFAN KRAUS ,
KIMBERLEY DRIPPS ,
MEGAN C. EVANS ,
PHILIP GIBBONS ,
HUGH P. POSSINGHAM  and
MARTINE MARON
KATHERINE L. MILLER*
Affiliation:
Australian Government Department of the Environment, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
JAMES A. TREZISE
Affiliation:
Australian Government Department of the Environment, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
STEFAN KRAUS
Affiliation:
Australian Government Department of the Environment, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
KIMBERLEY DRIPPS
Affiliation:
Australian Government Department of the Environment, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
MEGAN C. EVANS
Affiliation:
Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
PHILIP GIBBONS
Affiliation:
Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
HUGH P. POSSINGHAM
Affiliation:
Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia Imperial College London, Department of Life Sciences, Silwood Park, Ascot SL5 7PY, Berkshire, UK
MARTINE MARON
Affiliation:
Landscape Ecology and Conservation Group, School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia
*
*Correspondence: Dr Katherine Miller Tel: +61 429 203 675 e-mail: kat.miller@environment.gov.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Environmental offsetting involves compensating for the residual adverse impacts of an action on the environment by generating an equivalent benefit elsewhere. As the prevalence of environmental offsetting grows, so does the challenge of translating no-net-loss goals to workable policy. From 2011–2012, the Australian Government developed an Environmental Offsets Policy and an accompanying metric (the Offsets Assessment Guide) to support decision making about offset requirements under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Through extensive stakeholder consultation and in collaboration with academic researchers, the Guide was developed with the aim of accounting appropriately for ecological equivalence in a transparent and flexible manner. This paper outlines the Australian Government's environmental offset policy development process, and describes the approach adopted for evaluating the suitability of proposed offsets in meeting the policy goals. The Guide explicitly estimates the extent to which an offset will improve the target biota and/or avert future losses, the degree of confidence that the offset will be implemented successfully, and the time it will take to deliver a conservation benefit. Since implementation of the Environmental Offsets Policy and the Guide, there has been a shift in focus from estimating offset requirements based on simplistic area ratios, toward directly evaluating the components of an offset action that determine its environmental performance. Achieving a balance between scientific robustness and policy workability is an ongoing challenge. The Environmental Offsets Policy and Guide represent an important step towards consistency and transparency in environmental offset decision-making.

Keywords

Australiabiodiversityenvironmental offsetsmitigation hierarchyno net lossthreatened species

Information

Type
Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 42 , Issue 4: Thematic section: Tradable Rights in Conservation , December 2015 , pp. 306 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (2011) Submission to the Australian Government EPBC Act Environmental Offsets Policy: consultation draft [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
Australian Government (1999) Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/epbc Google Scholar
Australian Government (1992) Intergovernmental agreement on the environment [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/about-us/esd/publications/intergovernmental-agreement Google Scholar
BBOP (2012) Standard on Biodiversity Offsets [www document]. URL http://bbop.forest-trends.org/pages/guidelines Google Scholar
Bekessy, S. A., Wintle, B. A., Lindenmayer, D. B., McCarthy, M. A., Colyvan, M., Burgman, M. A. & Possingham, H. P. (2010) The biodiversity bank cannot be a lending bank. Conservation Letters 3: 151–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BirdLife Australia (2012) Offsets (biodiversity and native vegetation) policy [www document]. URL http://birdlife.org.au/documents/POL-Offsets-Policy.pdf Google Scholar
Brown, P. H. & Lant, C. L. (1999) The effect of wetland mitigation banking on the achievement of no-net-loss. Environmental Management 23: 333–345.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brownlie, S., King, N. & Treweek, J. (2013) Biodiversity tradeoffs and offsets in impact assessment and decision making: can we stop the loss? Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 31: 24–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bull, J. W., Suttle, K. B., Gordon, A., Singh, N. J. & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2013 a) Biodiversity offsets in theory and practice. Oryx 47: 369–380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bull, J., Suttle, K., Singh, N. & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2013 b) Conservation when nothing stands still: moving targets and biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 203–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bull, J. W., Gordon, A., Law, E. A., Suttle, K. B. & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2014) Importance of baseline specification in evaluating conservation interventions and achieving no net loss of biodiversity. Conservation Biology 28: 799–809.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coggan, A., Buitelaar, E., Bennett, J. & Whitten, S. M. (2013) Transferable mitigation of environmental impacts of development: two cases of offsets in Australia. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 15: 303–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coggan, A. & Whitten, S. M. (2013) Options for flexible biodiversity offset delivery: location, timing and tenure arrangements. Report. CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Brisbane, Australia.Google Scholar
Department of Environment and Water Resources (2007) Use of environmental offsets under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (draft) [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/archive/epbc/publications/draft-environmental-offsets-2007.html Google Scholar
Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (2010) RTA Weipa Pty Ltd/Mining/south of the Embley River, western Cape York Peninsula/QLD/South of the Embley Bauxite Mining Project. EPBC Act Public Notices [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/epbc/epbc_ap.pl?name=current_referral_detail&proposal_id=5642 Google Scholar
Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (2011) Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 Environmental Offsets Policy. Consultation draft. [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (2012) Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 Environmental Offsets Policy [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/resource/epbc-act-environmental-offsets-policy Google Scholar
Dunford, R. W., Ginn, T. C. & Desvousges, W. H. (2004) The use of habitat equivalency analysis in natural resource damage assessments. Ecological Economics 48: 49–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Environmental Defenders Office (Victoria) (2013) Reforming native vegetation offset rules in Victoria. Report. Environment Defenders Office (Victoria) Ltd, Melbourne, Australia.Google Scholar
Gardner, T. A., Von Hase, A., Brownlie, S., Ekstrom, J. M. M., Pilgrim, J. D., Savy, C. E., Stephens, R. T. T., Treweek, J., Ussher, G. T., Ward, G. & Ten Kate, K. (2013) Biodiversity offsets and the challenge of achieving no net loss. Conservation Biology 27: 1254–1264.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbons, P., Briggs, S. V., Ayers, D., Seddon, J., Doyle, S., Cosier, P., McElhinny, C., Pelly, V. & Roberts, K. (2009) An operational method to assess impacts of land clearing on terrestrial biodiversity. Ecological Indicators 9: 26–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbons, P., Lindenmayer, D. B., Fischer, J., Manning, A. D., Weinberg, A., Seddon, J., Ryan, P. & Barrett, G. (2008) The future of scattered trees in agricultural landscapes. Conservation Biology 22: 1309–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, A., Langford, W. T., Todd, J. A., White, M. D., Mullerworth, D. W. & Bekessy, S. A. (2011) Assessing the impacts of biodiversity offset policies. Environmental Modelling and Software 26: 1481–1488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Invasive Species Council (2011) EPBC Act environmental offsets policy: submission on consultation draft [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
Joseph, L. N., Maloney, R. F. & Possingham, H. P. (2009) Optimal allocation of resources among threatened species: a project prioritization protocol. Conservation Biology 23: 328–338.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maron, M., Dunn, P. K., McAlpine, C. A. & Apan, A. (2010) Can offsets really compensate for habitat removal? The case of the endangered red-tailed black-cockatoo. Journal of Applied Ecology 47: 348–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maron, M., Rhodes, J. R. & Gibbons, P. (2013) Calculating the benefit of conservation actions. Conservation Letters 6: 359–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Drivers of Change. Washington, DC, USA: World Resources Institute.Google Scholar
Moilanen, A., van Teeffelen, A. J. A., Ben-Haim, Y. & Ferrier, S. (2009) How much compensation is enough? A framework for incorporating uncertainty and time discounting when calculating offset ratios for impacted habitat. Restoration Ecology 17: 470–478.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Farmers’ Federation (2011) Submission to the EPBC Act offsets policy and cost recovery, biodiversity policy and national centre [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
Overton, J. M., Stephens, R. T. T. & Ferrier, S. (2013) Net present biodiversity value and the design of biodiversity offsets. Ambio 42: 100–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pilgrim, J. D., Brownlie, S., Ekstrom, J. M. M., Gardner, T. A., von Hase, A., ten Kate, K., Savy, C. E., Stephens, R. T. T., Temple, H. J., Treweek, J., Ussher, G. T. & Ward, G. (2012) A process for assessing offsetability of biodiversity impacts. Conservation Letters 6: 376–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Productivity Commission (2013) Major project development assessment process. Research Report. Productivity Commission, Canberra, Australia.Google Scholar
Rio Tinto (2011) Submission to the Australian Government EPBC Act Environmental Offsets Policy: consultation draft [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
State of the Environment Committee (2011) Australia State of the Environment 2011. Independent report to the Australian Government Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. Canberra, Australia.Google Scholar
Trust for Nature (Victoria) (2008) Environmental offsets under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Case studies: final report. Trust for Nature, Victoria, Australia.Google Scholar
Turner, R. E., Redmond, A. M. & Zedler, J. B. (2001) Count it by acre or function: mitigation adds up to a net loss of wetlands. National Wetlands Newsletter 23: 5–16.Google Scholar
Urban Development Institute of Australia (2011) Submission to the Australian Government EPBC Act Environmental Offsets Policy: consultation draft [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
World Wide Fund for Nature Australia (2011) WWF Submission on the EPBC Act environmental offsets policy consultation draft [www document]. URL http://www.environment.gov.au/node/18729 Google Scholar
Wooller, S. J., Wooller, R. D. & Brown, K. L. (2002) Regeneration by three species of Banksia on the south coast of Western Australia in relation to fire interval. Australian Journal of Botany 50, 311–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Miller supplementary material

Miller supplementary material

Download Miller supplementary material(File)
File 46.3 KB