Respondent 8 (Academic Researcher)
Interviewer(s): Me
Interviewee(s): Respondent

Me: So, as you know the project seeks to elicit stakeholder perceptions to biodiversity offsetting. I chose to study this topic because it has received quite low scholarship and intersects with a lot of different environmental discourses. I also did a project with SEI on sustainable construction so I was interested in how the responsibilities of business are changing towards the environment. I was interested in your perspective because you have worked at the interface between science and policy and have helped to improve the agenda building capacity of environmental research in this area.

Respondent: You have looked at the government green paper on this have you?

Me: yep

Respondent: So you know all about that... and did you see the response that name and I wrote to that? It is on the X website and in the X newsletter... So what we were asked to do by NERC who is the major environmental funder was to provide a NERC response on the government green paper on biodiversity offsetting. So, that is where I am coming from... I know a little bit about it.

Me: That is brilliant. I will definitely have a look at that. I think the best place to start is probably the license to trash rhetoric that Biodiversity Offsetting sometimes receives. So the first question: whether you think biodiversity offsetting will afford species greater or less protection.

Respondent: I think potentially, it should afford them much greater protection. But the difficultly is... It is whether we are talking about biodiversity offsetting with a small 'b' and a small 'o' which is the kind a generic process - or whether we are talking about biodiversity offsetting which is the government's green paper on species protection. My view is, biodiversity offsetting with a small 'b' and a small 'o' can certainly do that. Biodiversity Offsetting alla green paper is probably fundamentally flawed in any respects and may only help the planners.

Me: And what is the distinction between the two?

Respondent: It is really because, biodiversity offsetting which people have, which name has written on. You saw her post note did you?

Me: Yes

Respondent: Y'know, it's a concept we ought to integrate in any environmental impact we make on the environment, whether it is farming, planning, the construction or whatever, we ought to at least make an attempt to replace what we are going to lose by creating something elsewhere and that something elsewhere is some sort of habitat. In the case of newts it is translocation of the whole population - but that is an odd one out. So, that is a general thing - and also it includes things like ecosystem services, so if you decide to dredge out a large area of the humber estuary for port development and you are going to destroy 100ha of saltmarsh, then you have to restore or create that elsewhere. Now that is not part of the government's green paper - which is a bit confused, a bit wooly and not very well put together and really talks about individual species and not ecological processes.

Me: So is that species based instead of habitat ?

Respondent: Yes - although the actual way it would be done is actually going to be habitat based, because that is the only way it can really work and that is why the government's green paper is just a dog's breakfast of ill-defined stuff. I don't know if you have read or seen the commentaries on that from the House of Lords?

Me: Yes, I found it quite hard to access but I will have a look.

Respondent: There must a recording on youtube somewhere. What they did, they had various proponents of BO and various interested parties shall we say, some of them quite nutty. At the end of it Owen Patterson made a statement and that should be all youtube so it will be a good idea to have a look at that.

Me: You talked about like-for-like offsetting, which is an assumption of pursuing a no-net loss policy goal. I'm not an ecologist, but from your perspective, based on restorative ecology, can you completely offset a habitat.

Respondent: No, I suspect that's not true. If you have a habitat you want to... There are several elements to this. One is, if you have a habitat that is going to be destroyed because you are going to build a supermarket there or something like that, then that habitat is likely to have been there for at least several hundred years, and have a whole sweep of various interactions attached to it. Just thinking you can kind of create a similar habitat somewhere else immediately denovo is pretty naive because all the interactions won't be there and we have no idea how long they will take to develop. That could be, that within 50 years or 100 years those things will develop, but there isn't a time line on the government green paper for any of this, they have not thought that through at all. Technically speaking, it is impossible to replace like-for-like, except for very specific things, y'know, if you rip a hedgerow out here, which was only planted ten years ago, and plant another one, then you probably gonna get the same thing in ten-years time.

Me: So if it's simple it is easier?

Respondent: I think so, the same would be for newt populations as well, ponds are pretty simple systems, but for anything more complex like a woodland or a salt marsh, then you probably being very optimistic, even heroic, in thinking you can do it. But it's attractive from the biodiversity point of view because at the moment the planning process doesn't insist on any of that, so often some deal will be done either between biodiversity and some other environmental good the community want, it could be a school playground, or a park, or bit of green infrastructure, or cash payments, compensation to a land owner.

Me: And you talked about the time horizons. In any case in the stage where the offset is maturing and developing there will a loss in access to green space and also the benefits derived from ecosystem services won't be received by the community.

Respondent: I think that's right. There are two things there, you're absolutely right. The full benefits that have been lost will not be realised for many years to come. The second thing is the green paper is conspicuously silent about where that biodiversity offsetting should take place. So let's say you have for instance in York at Fishergate which destroys - because that's what it will do covering it in concrete - several hectares of woodland, at the moment, under the present scheme you could go to a biodiversity offsetting bank and buy an equivalent area of woodland somewhere else. Now, that might not then be available to the same beneficiaries who have lost the benefit of the woodland in Sainsburys. So you've got the habitat, there is no-net loss, but the benefits are lost to those individual people and that's an equity issue, a social-justice issue the green paper fails to deal with. But there is another element here with the temporal element of restoration in that if it takes 5 years for that hedge row to come back that's one thing, if it takes 40 or 50 years for that woodland to come back then the climate in the local area will be totally different to what it would be in 50 years time and actually it might make sense to stick that woodland somewhere else otherwise it would just be a waste of time.

Me: So do you think the responsibilities would change, also with the changing economic, political or legal landscape, over time, if you decide on an offset now, 50 years from now it's...

Respondent: Yes - well there is that as well. I don't mean that, I mean the physical climate would change, but also the policy climate is likely to change. One of the other things we have to do is feed quite a lot of people in the world by 2030, 2050, another 3bn probably, or 2bn, so we have to change the way we manage the land and our social attitudes towards the land will be completely different therefore putting something off in to the future that you hope will be realised may be a fools errand because society’s attitude as to whether that is important may well change in the future and the policy environment is likely to be quite different.

Me: So do you think on that kind of link, remunerating the communities is important, by keeping the offsets local?

Respondent: Yes - but most of these places where developments are taking place, then, there isn't anywhere to put them, unless it is on a brownfield site or something like that - in that case, why don't you build the Sainsburys on the brownfield site to start with.

Me: And to what extent do you think the benefits derived from ecosystems or biodiversity can be taken into a market and valued?

Respondent: It depends on the benefits, I mean some of them clearly do have market values. If you are destroying a wood, there is a timber value to that. You should be able some time in the future to put a market value on carbon sequestration once we get carbon trading off the ground although Defra has been really slow on that in this country. There is also other monetary considerations - water rentention, water purification, the cost of pollution - so you could actually put a monetary value on those. It is quite hard for society to put a value that can be used in any sort of market way on many other aspects on biodiversity, including some of the more intrinsic properties: the biodiversity's right to exist, the bequest value for future generations and all that kind of stuff and people feel quite uncomfortable about that. I'm just trying to talk objectively now, but there are people that believe taking that woodland down, in Fishergate or where ever it is, you shouldn't do that because I want my Grandchildren to see it and that's quite a hard thing to put a market price on if you think about it. So, market pricing for ecosystem services is a convenient way to perhaps put a monetary valuation on how much people are willing to pay for these things, is a convenient way of sorting out people's preferences for future situations, but I don't think. Sorry... monetary valuation is a convenient way for sorting out people's preferences of particular futures based on a common currency, but I don't think they are gonna be much use in terms of markets.

Me: So, you wouldn't like to see Biodiversity offsets taken into a market?

Respondent: That is going to happen, there are people already in the city and various other places thinking we can make a buck out of this and they are buying up habitats in order to bank them against future planning requirements and there is very low risk to that, they have got the land so it is not going to depreciate. I believe there will be a market in biodiversity offsetting, there will be banks and people will compete to sell you a biodiversity offset.

Me: So what do you think the risks and opportunities of the private sector being included in this process, either as a broker or a kind of land owner?

Respondent: I suppose the risks of that, the risks come in the planning regime not specifying what should be replaced by what. If it is very general, so if you knock a woodland down in York there is somebody with a bit of woodland in Aberdeen, you can trade that off, someone is going to trade you that woodland or whatever, actually, that isn't no net loss because the woodland was there already. If people are building habitats to bank against the future that is something different because you are creating something denovo to mean there wasn't any net loss. In the government green paper, the specification of how these offsets should be calculated is based on pretty crude criteria. so for woodland it doesn't recognise particular species, it just looks at amount of closed canopy cover, which, you could have a Eucalyptus woodland or a Caledonian Pine woodland, it would give you the same value on the biodiversity offsetting scheme. So that is the real danger, that a planning authority says OK you can go ahead and build this because there is this other 100% closed canopy in Norfolk or somewhere, when you get there you find it's all Sitka Spruce or Eucalyptus, but it actually satisfies the condition as like-for-like, because the like-for-like defined in the planning authority is 90% or 60% closed woodland.

Me: So is the matrix too simplistic?

Respondent: Well the problem at the moment isn't specified. The example they show is an example from Australia, where actually it doesn't work at all, people have shown this already, so you could not have picked a worse example if you wanted to promote biodiversity offsetting for planning. There are much better ones that have been developed - you know about the pilot schemes that have been developed in East Anglia?

Me: Yep

Respondent: They are quite smart - there they suggest you replace oak woodland with oak woodland, but they are not the metrics for biodiversity offsetting being recommended by the green paper.

Me: So people are using different metrics?

Respondent: Well we're not there yet, but it could be, by the time this gets in to the planning system, they'll have tidied these things up.

Me: And what do you think the emphasis on just the use of market based instruments is. Do you think it will change the goalposts of conservation?

Respondent: Yes and no, because some people feel quite comfortable about that, including some of our big nature organisations, the RSPB, Natural England, realise that writings on the wall and people are going down this ecosystem approach where you have to value all those different aspects of the environment and you can put a price on them, which can be traded in some way. But there are a whole raft of people who do not like this at all and they are not going to do, there is no doubt about it. That includes many people who are responsible for wildlife management, so I don't know how that is going to pan out. If you want my personal view, I think a full cost accounting of what environmental damage is from developers is a major step forward and if you have to use monetary valuation to do that, that's OK. But there is a whole group out there that says you just can't do that, nature is above any consideration of monetary valuation and nature shouldn't be traded in the market end of story and that's a philosophical question that you have to deal with as a politician.

Me: I think, in between that is, we have the numbers, but what do they actually mean, what kind of role do you think they should hold in informing policy?

Respondent: Ah right, so for appraising policy, when people are deciding on a plan, it could be a regional plan or it could be a local plan. So, for a local plan, somebody could come along and say, I want to build a supermarket here and there will be a number of things to consider. One will be the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems and all sorts of things. But from the planning perspective, that is just a very small part and using market-based techniques you can make some sort of cost benefit analysis for the loss of biodiversity and so on as opposed to other things. But that is only one sort of balance sheet that a planner would use. T here are whole techniques now in addition to those that are based on multi-criteria analysis and they are much better for the softer values people hold that are much harder to express and capture in any sort of monetary form. You can use citizens juries and all sorts of things and bring them in to play but you can't combine them with the monetary things, it's just another balance sheet. So pros and cons monetary, another balance sheet which is these shared values people have, then there is a third balance sheet which is something policy-makers have to deal with, what affect is that going to have on jobs, skills and what affect is it going to have on my ability to get elected in parliament and these are things that go on in the mind of policy makers and they use all three of those balance sheets and the biodiversity bit is just a very small part of that. So, in answer to your question, what affect they will have, what will the valuation of nature will have on nature, all i can say it it's bigger now that it is 10 years ago, from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment and all these other things there is a realisation there are lots of externalities caused by particular kinds of development and we need to capture them and somebody has to pay for them somehow. That they all need to be brought into some sort of equation, but it's not a mathematical equation and people...

Me: So, they can't be conflated?

Respondent: They cannot be conflated and Kerry Turner has written a very interesting article on this for, have you seen that? She wrote it for the natural capital committee of the UK which reports to George Osbourne, there are different basis that people make these kinds of decisions. It is certainly a framework which describes how people make decisions and it is always a bit of a shock for conservation ecologists that the conservation evidence is only one piece of evidence that influences a decision - there are lots of other things that influence them and that's why Kerry did it, to show that actually, people like me can spend all this time doing this kind of junk and showing how much nature is worth, but at the end of the day someone like Cameron might say something like dredge the Summerset levels, which I can tell you know is going to be absolutely pointless, but it is a high-profile action that will keep the heat off the government, that is a political decision that is made for a government intervention, nothing to do with science at all. We don't have science based policy, we have science influenced policy and there are loads of other things that come into the equation as well.

Me: And maybe just as a last point, if you had the matrix in your hands, what kind of things would you factor into it, or parameters would you add to it.

Respondent: I think you would need to think very hard, if it is really biodiversity offsetting, what you would want to do is at least talk about individual species. For the woodland offsetting it is about canopy cover which doesn't take into account the characteristics or composition of the woodland at all. You would need some measure of species or structure if you like. But you would also need some metric which reflects function, so the ability of that bit to deliver the carbon targets for our city, with all our targets, for water retention, so i would have most of the ecosystem services in there and particular species for that kind of habitat.

Me: Should there be a social aspect or not?

Respondent: Well it wouldn't be biodiversity offsetting then? I think social aspect would come it, because these things are benefits that people require, so i guess they are implicit. I do believe social consideration ought to come into the planning process, but that's not a biodiversity metric, that's something else.

Me: And are there any conflicts between kind of ecological compensation and social compensation?

Respondent: Yes - of course, on the social compensations you might have is something like jobs, so the social considerations that most planners have to deal with are nothing to do with the environment, they are housing, education, skills, training, transport, probably transport, which you would imagine is related to biodiversity, but usually more related to heritage, physical infrastructure - that is at the top of their list, some of the social things they have to think about and the biodiversity will affect those because you can't have good tourism or a good environment or even employment without a lot of biodiversity to generate the goods and services which people depend on, but making those links usually isn't done by the planning authorities. The other issue we have is the poor buggers that have to do this haven't got the tools at all to do it. There are two problems there, they don't have time to learn all this stuff, so they need a look up table. They don't have time to develop the experience on which those decisions need to be based, so you might have a matrix, but unless you know what that's all about you have no idea so that's when sort of power dynamics come into those sorts of discussions in councils. So people with the loudest voices will probably get the thing done and a lot of rhetoric goes into the discourse, “what do you want jobs or nature" y'know, of course they are not incompatible, but people are presented with false choices. Or, it could be, the loudest voice on the council, not the most representative, but the most powerful voice for all sorts of reasons are the conservation lobby, which might go against all sorts of social dimensions within the planning process that you might want to include. We like to think in universities or research institutes once we have these formulas for these things it’s all going to be very straight forward. A really good example is badgers, we know that killing badgers is going to have no effect on TB transmission, at the most it would reduce it by 18%, but we are going to go ahead with it simply because that is what farmers want to do. That’s completely irrational scientifically, but culturally it is probably quite rational, so that's the milieu that you are going to find yourself in I'm afraid.