Can we offset biodiversity losses?

This article was published in The Conversation, 6 May 2013

Update: Also republished in the Brisbane Times and SBS News Australia, 7 May 2013

Megan Evans & Martine Maron

This Green and Golden Bell Frog is one of the few species to be successfully protected using offsets. Flickr/eyeweed

This Green and Golden Bell Frog is one of the few species to be successfully protected using offsets. Flickr/eyeweed

Clive Palmer’s China First Coal Project is entering the last stages of review for its proposed coal mine in Queensland’s Bimblebox Nature Refuge. As part of the Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), the proposal suggests protecting about two hectares of remnant bush for every one hectare of the nature refuge that is affected by the mine. That sounds like we’re getting two for one – but biodiversity offsets aren’t that simple.

Biodiversity offsetting is an increasingly popular means to balance out the impact developments have on the environment. Just as many of us will purchase a carbon offset to compensate for the emissions we generate when we take an overseas flight, biodiversity offsetting aims for “no net loss” of biodiversity values from a development project.

Like carbon offsets, biodiversity offsetting is a controversial topic. Recent media in the UK has highlighted how contentious it can be, with the UK government’s trial of its new biodiversity offsetting scheme decried by some as “a license to trash nature”.

One of the problems for biodiversity offsetting is working out whether “no net loss” is actually being achieved. Despite the widespread and growing use of offsets, very little evidence is available to demonstrate what those offsets deliver. Continue reading →

Calculating the benefits of conservation actions

In the new issue of Decision Point magazine, Martine Maron from UQ has penned an article on a collaboration I was involved with between researchers in the NERP Environmental Decisions Hub, and the Australian  Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (DSEWPaC) staff.

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It’s projected that nearly a billion hectares of terrestrial ecosystems will be lost by 2050 as land is converted into places to grow food and fibre, extract minerals and oil, or house people. Even with a first-rate  protected area network, such losses of habitat mean that extinctions will continue (and likely accelerate). Is there a way to stem such losses in the face of inevitable development?

Environmental offsetting is held up by many as an answer. The approach is often encountered in the context of climate change mitigation. Carbon offsets involve capturing and retaining carbon in terrestrial sinks to compensate for emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Would a similar approach work for biodiversity?

Biodiversity offsetting involves compensating for environmental damage at one location by generating ecologically equivalent gains at another, so that there is ‘no net loss’. Biodiversity offsets are increasingly being used as a regulatory tool to balance the needs of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Unfortunately, such schemes are often prone to failure due to poor design and implementation.

The EPBC Act Offsets Policy

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act is the Australian Government’s key piece of environmental legislation. It regulates impacts on matters of national environmental significance, such as nationally threatened species and world heritage areas as well as actions that involve the Commonwealth. Developed following broad consultation, the recently released EPBC Act environmental offsets  policy (October 2012) sets out the principles for effective offsetting for those protected matters regulated under national environmental law.

The policy was developed with a number of explicit aims, including improving the environmental outcomes that EPBC Act offsets deliver and providing greater certainty and transparency around regulatory decision making. One of the key priorities arising from the policy development process and identified by Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (DSEWPaC) staff was the development of a transparent offsets guide that would give effect to the policy principles when assessing biodiversity offsets.

A new offsets assessment guide

The final EPBC Act Offsets assessment guide emerged through a collaborative effort between DSEWPaC staff and researchers in the NERP Environmental Decisions Hub. The offsets assessment guide provides a tool for evaluating whether offsets for impacts on nationally threatened species and ecological communities are adequate. It is the first tool in operation in any jurisdiction worldwide that explicitly and transparently accounts for additionality, uncertainty, and time lags in calculating an offset requirement.

Read the rest of the article in Decision Point

Science and social media – why you should care (+ a rant about unreasonable blogging expectations)

Update 27/2/13: See Phil’s comment below – he recommends using active voice and first-person narrative in scientific papers – not present tense as I previously claimed

Last week I gave a presentation to 3rd year students as part of a Biodiversity Conservation (ENVS3039) lecture at the ANU. Phil Gibbons (one of my PhD supervisors) is convening the course, and aims to give students a solid understanding of science communication in all its forms.

Phil opened the lecture by giving a short and sharp outline of how to write a scientific paper, bluntly stating that in his trademark good humour that ”undergrads are crap writers – in this course we’re going to change that.” In the student’s defense I will say that we are trained to write badly in high school science class – it still takes at least a 4 year Bachelors + Honours degree to stamp out these bad habits (writing in past tense passive voice, 3rd person narrative etc)!

David Salt, editor of Decision Point magazine gave the students some pointers on how to write for a wide audience – by using plain English,  an active voice, keeping things short  and simple, varying sentence and paragraph lengths, and above all, being enthusiastic about what you’re writing (which means you want to write about something you care about).

For my presentation, Phil wanted me to focus on blogging and tweeting, as part of the course assessment  requires students to write at least one blog and tweet during the course. Based on the ‘show of hands’ poll at the beginning of class it seemed that about 3 (of 68) students had a twitter account, about 6 read blogs (1 or 2 had a blog of their own). So it seems very few are currently using social media (other than Facebook!) very actively.

The main thing I wanted to communicate to students was really just to have a go at using social media to engage with science. It can be quite daunting to someone just starting out with social media to be faced with a raft of ‘do’s and don’ts’ – e.g post at least once a week, make sure what you write is exciting/interesting/funny, don’t make it too long, etc etc.

Of course all of these guidelines make sense if you want to have a “successful” blog – by which “success” is defined as a large, engaged audience. But if you’re a student or young scientist just starting out, these expectations can be a huge barrier to starting a blog in the first place. Just last week someone said to me:

“I would  really love to start blogging again, but then I think that once I start I really should post at least every week or two, and I’m not sure I can do that – so I haven’t posted anything.”

Therein lies the problem. If you’re new to blogging  or science communication, you can’t expect yourself to be an amazing blogger from the get go – that’s like expecting yourself to have the knowledge and experience of a Professor when you’re still a student! I say all this because these unreasonable expectations held me back from having my own blog for a long time.

I know that by “good blog” standards that my blog is pretty crap – I don’t post regularly, don’t really get any comments, but my average daily view is still about 5-10 unique visitors. That’s totally OK by me. I decided when I finally started this blog that I would be doing it first of all for myself - forget about pleasing an audience, and focus primarily on blogging for my own goals – improving my science communication, and in a small way, getting my research out there. Once I decided this it was quite liberating!

I am happy with my blog – at this stage of my career (i.e a rather confused just starting out PhD student) I think it’s perfectly OK. For some bizarre reason, I do still have people tell me how much they like my blog –  I think it’s perhaps a good conversation starter when meeting people for the first time over email or in person. The mere fact that I have a blog/website to call my own is more than what many of my colleagues have, but I think many of them would have a blog/website/twitter account if their perceptions were different.

So, that was my key message – have a go, and don’t get too hung up on ‘do’s and don’ts’, lest you place unreasonable expectations on yourself. Social media is meant to be fun way to engage with science (or whatever your interest is), and other like-minded people who you wouldn’t otherwise get to meet in person. I think it’s fantastic that Phil has incorporated social media into the course, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the students post on their blog (www.biodiversityconservationblog.wordpress.com) in the near future.

My SHE XIX talk – now on SlideShare

I recently gave a talk at the  XIX International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology, 8th February 2013 – held at the Fenner School, ANU.

Here I outline my approach for evaluating the impact of a) legislation restricting vegetation removal, and b) biodiversity offset policies on achieving a ‘no net loss’ in vegetation across Australia, as well as some (very!) preliminary findings.

If you want to the additional commentary that came with the slides, read on:

Continue reading →

The economics of climate adaptation – my CSIRO PhD scholarship

csiro

I received some fantastic news in time for Christmas (although failed to post a blog until now) –  my application for a CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship top-up PhD scholarship has been successful. My topic is entitled ‘Economics of climate adaptation: Using economic theory to identify adaptation options at different scales’.

With this scholarship, I aim to expand on my research into the economics of carbon farming to look more broadly at common climate mitigation options – such as carbon offsets – from a climate adaptation perspective.

When considering climate mitigation options, it’s common to use standard cost-benefit analysis to establish their economic viability. For example, when calculating whether it’s worthwhile for a landholder to participate in the carbon farming initiative, we want to consider the potential benefits (carbon price x carbon sequestered), costs (land value, management, market participation costs) – and then determine the net present value of carbon farming over a particular time frame (currently the CFI requires carbon sinks to remain in place for 100 years).

However, this type of analysis makes a few crucial assumptions that make it not so suitable for climate adaptation. Firstly, it’s usually assumed that the carbon price either remains constant over that time period or follows some basic linear projection (e.g 4% increase pa). Secondly, we’re also ignoring the possible risks that climate change will bring within the next century – whether it be direct risks to the carbon offset vegetation (e.g temperature, rainfall changes), or possible land use changes.  Unfortunately, these uncertainties are not often properly accounted for in economic analyses of climate adaptation options.

I’ll be investigating a few different methodologies that take a risk-based approach to analyse the costs and benefits of different climate adaptation options, such as real options analysis and modern portfolio theory. I hope this work will assist  in the development of incentives and policies for climate adaptation in Australia, as well as identifying potential economic and policy barriers.

Seminar @ UMelb, Monday 26 November

I’ve landed in Melbourne after a whirlwind fortnight of conferences and meetings at UQ in Brisbane (ok, I did find some time to go to the beach), and now tomorrow I’ll be giving a seminar at 11am, in the School of Botany, University of Melbourne (Building 123, Room G26). Big thanks to @mickresearch for organising this for me. Details below:

Hello, Melbourne

The impact of formal regulation and offset policy on the rate of deforestation in Australia

Deforestation remains the number one driver of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation worldwide. In Australia, regulatory reforms (including legislation and offset policies) have been implemented across several states in an effort to reduce the loss of native vegetation. However, so far there has been little research on the effectiveness of such regulatory processes, and whether they have had any significant impact on deforestation as compared to social, economic and climatic drivers. Using fine-scale satellite imagery, we have analysed the change in forest cover across the Australian continent for the years 1972-2011. The rate of deforestation was examined according to State, tenure (leasehold, freehold and public land) and major land use, in order to align our calculations with legislative and policy reach. Future work will use time series analysis to determine whether the introduction of land clearing legislation or offset policies had an impact on the rate of deforestation, or whether social, economic and climatic drivers overwhelmed the regulatory processes aimed to control deforestation.

In this talk, I’ll present some preliminary findings from this study (which I’m working on with Phil Gibbons & Andrew Macintosh).  I’ll also briefly outline some recent findings from work which aimed to examine the economic potential for carbon farming (environmental plantings and managed regrowth) in agricultural landscapes in Queensland.