A licence to trash the planet?
The state says new mechanism will secure threatened ecosystems and critical biodiversity
THE Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) has outlined a long-awaited new draft policy that spells out how some of the country’s ecosystems can be “exchanged for economic development” through a controversial conservation mechanism called biodiversity offsets.
This will allow destructive development projects to continue “in exchange for the protection of equal biodiversity elsewhere” after the developer has undertaken the appropriate prevention and mitigation measures.
Biodiversity offsets will force developers to pay for the damage they have inflicted by legally securing equivalent areas for conservation through the declaration of protected areas or creating lasting servitudes, asserts the draft policy.
But some conservation experts are worried that biodiversity offsets simply give developers a “licence to trash” the environment and “put a price on nature”, by commodifying it, rather than championing its protection.
“The issue of biodiversity offsetting was a big topic last year at the World Conservation Congress because, in the absence of appropriate policy and legislation, offsetting is being badly abused across the planet,” explains Lemson Betha, the head of ecological infrastructure and Morgan Griffiths, the environmental governance manager, at the Wildlife and Environment Society of SA.
“In South Africa, it’s an emerging issue because more and more resource extraction industries are saying, ‘let’s frack there, or mine here, and we’ll give you a similar piece of land somewhere else’. There needs to be a real recognition that everything else has been tried and that’s an opportunity for offsetting, otherwise these must be no-go areas. I think this draft policy does address that.”
Biodiversity offsets, say the DEA, will “strengthen biodiversity protection” by introducing systems to “compensate or offset damage to nature”.
This will contribute to “securing priority biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in perpetuity”. There’s a strong argument to save South Africa’s rich though fast-vanishing biodiversity, which is the battered backbone for our economic, social and spiritual well-being, say experts.
The country is home to more than 95 000 known species and ranked one of the three most mega-biodiverse nations in the world, along with Brazil and Indonesia, with many species found nowhere else on Earth.
It boasts three of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots, the Cape Flor- istic Kingdom, the Western Cape/ Succulent Karoo region and the Maputaland-Pondoland region.
Yet, at the same time, South Africa’s national development plan envisions economic growth that will double GDP and wipe out poverty in the next 13 years.
While offsets have been used “ad hoc” for the past 20 years – researchers cite at least 50 examples although there is no official offset registry – the controversial mechanism can create the illusion of sustainability.
“Offsets are used to justify the unjustifiable; projects that should be rejected are allowed on the basis of offset proposals; illegal practices are permitted on the basis of offsets,” says groundWork, an environmental lobby group.
Friends of the Earth Europe, which is fighting the EU’s controversial policies on biodiversity offsets, concurs. “By promising to restore or even increase biodiversity somewhere else to make up for its destruction, the mechanism paves the way for destroying it in the first place – it delivers a licence to trash.”
If nature’s value is expressed in monetary terms, it says, there’s a high risk nature can then legitimately be destroyed as long as payment is made.
The DEA says South Africa is fast losing the ability to protect “viable witness sites (high conservation value) that are not only an international obligation but a constitutional imperative.
“This will lead to a serious impact on ecosystem services that, especially, rural people are dependent on for survival.” In these, development must be moved elsewhere.
But “there are certain ecosystems where we can still afford to exchange some of our natural capital for economic development”.
Professor Nick King, an environmental futurist, argues biodiversity offsets lead to the cumulative effect of “death by 1 000 cuts” – a price society and biodiversity ultimately pay.
Biodiversity is remarkably complex and unique. “It’s not possible to ‘replace’ a destroyed area with another, because ecosystems and biodiversity don’t work at individual plant or animal scale, but over vast landscape scales and timescales…”
It is a set of interlinking systems, where every impact generates various responses, often in unforeseen, unpredictable ways. “Any form of ‘development’ breaks those linkages, and offsets don’t repair them.”
Instead, they’re “just a copout” to enable rubber-stamping of unsustainable development “while developers laugh all the way to the bank”.
For him, there are two key concerns. “First, they become someone else’s responsibility and permanent cost sink (not the developer, but a conservation agency and municipality). Second, no offset can ever be guaranteed ‘in perpetuity’, so they’re just enabling the current developer to get away with environmental degradation.”
The draft policy does set out the measures that need to be enacted to ensure developers have sufficient funding to implement and maintain the offset.
Jeffrey Manuel, the director of biodiversity information and planning at the SA National Biodiversity Institute, who helped develop the national policy, says offsets are “quite new and seeing growing application in South Africa”.
Only the Western Cape – it started in 2005 – and KwaZulu-Natal have developed their own guidelines and policies while Gauteng has developed draft guidelines internally.
“There are challenges involved in successful implementation but having the policy in place that clearly recognises offsets within the mitigation hierarchy can assist in achieving better outcomes for biodiversity. We don’t expect offsets to be a silver bullet,” says Manuel.
Offsets shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. “They should always be used in conjunction with measures to avoid and minimise impacts.”
Professor of political economy at the University of Pretoria, Lorenzo Fioramonti, says companies involved in offsets usually earn credits that can be used to justify “their polluting practices”.
“In theory, offsets should eventually balance off. In reality, it’s been demonstrated offset mechanisms designed to protect the environment can easily backfire and produce perverse incentives.
“In the case of carbon emissions, for instance, the Kyoto protocol’s clean development mechanism… has not had a reduction in emissions. If anything, there’s evidence of the opposite.
“Are we really sure a specific investment in clean technologies or reforestation – two typical examples of offsets – can generate a good enough impact to offset the damage created in the first place by drilling for oil or digging for coal?”
There’s a behavioural problem, too.
“The existence of offsets basically cleans their (companies’) conscience, given that the system allows them to offset the damage.”
The draft policy states that while offsets offer clear benefits as an “emerging tool” to stop the loss of biodiversity, they are not appropriate where irreplaceable biodiversity would be impacted adversely.
“There’s a concern therefore that unless their use is strictly controlled, they could be used as leverage to obtain authorisation for listed activities in cases where offsets should not be considered, resulting in the net loss of critical biodiversity,” says the draft policy.
Susie Brownlee, an expert in biodiversity offsetting, is adamant it should never be used to make an unacceptable development proposal acceptable. “They really are the last resort mitigation option.”
She welcomes the draft policy as providing important “building blocks” and believes the scope for offsets is large. “If you add all the remaining negative impacts not remedied by developers, you can understand why the downhill slope of biodiversity loss is continuing in South Africa.”
Melissa Fourie, the executive director of the Centre for Environmental Rights, says if used responsibly, in specific, well-defined circumstances and in accordance with internationally accepted best practice, offsets can be a “very effective way” to secure funding to restore degraded environments and preserve areas of significant ecological value.
If not, “they become an easy, cheap way for developers to buy themselves out of the real consequences of destroying sensitive areas”.
South Africa does not yet have a proper, consistent regime to regulate offsets. “Despite this we’ve seen a number of offsets included in authorisations, for inappropriate developments.
“The offset for CoAL of Africa’s Vele coal mine in Limpopo (see box) is just one example of how things go wrong. In the end, the offset was for far less than authorities had wanted, and had very little to do with biodiversity.
“And yet this offset was used to justify the retrospective authorisation of illegal and damaging activities.”
Amrei Von Hase, a science adviser: business and biodiversity offsets programme at the Forest Trends Association, says until now offsets haven’t been adequately framed in the conditions of environmental authorisations.
“So, essentially what we need are very clear, explicit and enforceable conditions.”
Fourie shows how the DEA has used air-quality offsets to defend allowing the biggest polluters such as Eskom and Sasol “to continue to violate air quality standards”.
“Ultimately, these ‘offset’ projects should not be allowed to replace the obligation to comply with air-quality laws.”
For King, the ultimate question is what happens when there’s nowhere left to offset on a finite planet. “Will we then stop development?”
Fioramonti says: “Rather than focusing on offsets, policy should focus on incentivising a transition to a different economic model.
“Companies that minimise impacts should be rewarded, while those that have negative ecological footprints should be punished.”