Offsetting

In Australia, the State of the Environment 2021 report (hereafter, SOE) revealed an unprecedented rate of biodiversity loss.¹ Yet development projects that will reduce biodiversity further continue to receive legal approval. Indeed, shortly after the release of the report, a new outer ring road was approved for construction in the state of Western Australia.² Land clearing undertaken as part of the project will result in significant loss of existing habitat for critically endangered western ringtail possums and endangered black cockatoos. This destruction was legitimized through the state government’s commitment to undertake “biodiversity offsetting,” whereby the loss of possum and cockatoo habitats in one area would be substituted by revegetating and rehabilitating habitat with similar “biodiversity values” elsewhere.

The term biodiversity values is often used, but rarely defined, in relation to offsetting law and policy in Australia. Use of the term usually alludes to biophysical and ecological characteristics (including their form and function) and social values of the ecosystem in question. Science (and by extension law and policy) tends to distinguish between intrinsic and anthropocentric values. Intrinsic values are linked to those associated with the functioning of the ecological system and anthropocentric values to the ways in which humans can use the system.³ In this article, we highlight on the one hand the intrinsic/anthropocentric binary of scientific and policy understanding of biodiversity values. On the other hand, we embrace broader understandings of values such as those set out in the Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).⁴ The IPBES Values Assessment recognizes the challenge of defining the value of nature given multiple and diverse worldviews, cultures, knowledge systems, and disciplines; nevertheless, the assessment identifies a broad typology of nature’s values: relational values (i.e., the ways in which humans interact with nature and with each other as it relates to nature), instrumental values, and intrinsic values. The assessment also conceives of metrics to reflect the biophysical, monetary, and sociocultural importance of nature. At the same time, the report highlights the narrow set of values—those that can be traded in markets, that are prioritized in economic and political decision-making. The IPBES Values Assessment demonstrates that this limited set of monetary values is afforded priority in dominant societal norms and formal rules.

This lexicon brings together perspectives from the environmental humanities and law to examine “biodiversity offsetting” as enabling deeply problematic, neoliberal, and settler-colonial concepts, sets of practices and regulatory frameworks that are becoming increasingly common within planning law.⁵ We argue below that the concept of “slow violence” helps to explain the cumulative destruction enabled by biodiversity offsetting practices.⁶ More specifically, legal and regulatory frameworks that support biodiversity offsetting perpetuate damaging nature-culture “hyper-separations” that proliferate slow violence in diverse contexts.⁷

Compensating for biodiversity loss with “offsets” is commonly traced to the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, which established that in cases where damage to a particular site was unavoidable, compensation via biodiversity offsets might be adopted as a last resort.⁸ This occurred at a time when economic ideas were entering environmental regulation.⁹ Subsequently Australia, the United States, and the European Union have become key sites for the development of biodiversity credits schemes and other neoliberal biodiversity governance mechanisms.¹⁰

Within legal regulatory frameworks, the practice of offsetting is used to address a range of environmental concerns, including biodiversity destruction and carbon emissions.¹¹ In each case impacts from one activity are claimed to be offset by an act of restoration, conservation, or protection elsewhere and those working within regulatory frameworks are tasked with monitoring the equivalence of the acts of harm and restoration. In the context of planning law, offsetting functions as a mechanism to aid the approval of a development by attempting to ensure that biodiversity losses that occur at the site of the proposed development will be offset by protecting the same or similar biodiversity values elsewhere. Offsetting presupposes that biodiversity values can be detached from the material, cultural, and spiritual qualities of land. The effectiveness of offsetting is measured in terms of how biodiversity values can be replicated or reflected elsewhere, thereby reducing the place-based lived realities of entangled earthly life to a set of replicable and transferable categories or types.

The concept of biodiversity offsetting is underpinned by and reinforces damaging ontologies of hyperseparation.¹² These ontologies reinforce cultures in which (1) biodiversity is understood as distinct and governable; (2) land is conceptualized as an asset that can be privately owned; (3) land, ecosystems, and biodiversity are viewed as separate and alienable; (4) genetic biodiversity is accorded abstract value but is not protected in connection to specific places; and (5) protection is given to specific abstract habitat-types rather than to specific places, plants, or animals.

Robert Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is helpful in elucidating the consequences of biodiversity offsetting.¹³ He describes the “injurious invisibility” of environmental violence as unfolding gradually, both temporally and spatially, at a rate of attrition and out of sight to the extent that it is not seen as violence at all. The outcomes of slow violence are cumulative and result in displacements, underestimating the human and environmental cost of loss. Biodiversity offsetting enables the loss of places, one by one, by promising to protect others, deflecting attention about whether development should have been permitted at all.

We argue that slow violence is an important aspect of the many insidious consequences that offsetting unleashes, drawing us into a consideration of the loss and displacement of earthly life across broader scales and time frames. Offsetting reflects and reinforces the hyperseparation between capital’s interest in land, manifest through property, and nature; a value that is central to Western cultural views of “the environment.”¹⁴ Offsetting confirms that the valuations of land that promote capitalist and colonizing “human” interest are given primacy under planning law, perpetuating a system in which nature is commodified and fungible.

Offsetting is clearly deeply flawed. It is a neoliberal “solution” that enables violence in one area by promising to prevent violence in another, irrespective of whether that deferred violence was ever going to occur. By doing so, offsetting disregards the unique socioecological relationships, histories, meanings, and stories people the world over invest in place. In settler-colonial states like Australia and the United States, and the beneficiaries of settler-colonial violences in places such as Europe and the United Kingdom, offsetting holds important implications for Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with places and kinship species approved to be offset. Indeed, offsetting is dismissive of such socioecological relationships and of Indigenous sovereignties. Embedding offsetting into planning law therefore legalizes slow violence and perpetuates ongoing colonial violences.

Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, including Pairebeenne Trawlwoolway academic Lauren Tynan and Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee academic Vanessa Watts, we argue for a place-based politics that foregrounds relationality and responsibility and that works against the separation and lack of responsibility that comes with approaches based on human-nature ontological separation.¹⁵ “Repatriation of Indigenous land and life,” recognizing custodianship, socioecological relationships, and sovereignties of place are essential starting points for developing responsibilities of care within any land governance system.¹⁶

The responsibility for developers, planners, and legal systems should be to minimize violence and to enable healing when violence does occur.¹⁷ If this is not possible, the option should not be to offset but to refuse. To say no to development.¹⁸ Offsetting is currently seen as “successful” when it enables development. However, the success of biodiversity-oriented regulatory systems should instead be measured through active, collective practices of responsibility and care.¹⁹ From this basis, human relationships-as-place could be reconfigured so that development projects prioritize healing rather than prioritizing processes that enable development for its own sake.

Perhaps there are some possibilities in the sorts of recognition that the concept of offsetting legally allows—namely, that development causes harm and that developers have responsibilities to care. Currently the responsibility to care is displaced from the site being developed to the site being protected, ironically allowing developers to care less about places being developed. There are opportunities here, however, for a politics that refutes assertions about the fungibility of places, lives, and ecologies in settler-colonial states and beyond. This would bring the flawed assumptions that places can be exchanged into public view, enabling informed and productive debate on whether some histories, stories, and ecologies can/should be sacrificed to protect other histories, stories, and ecologies.

Three practical actions can assist this. First, academics and activists can promote a public politics that stresses the unique stories, relations, and sovereignties of place to counter the exchangeability logics embedded in hyperseparated offsetting mechanisms. Second, researchers can collate evidence about the impacts of offsetting and how this compares to other land management regimes, including on lands cared for by Indigenous peoples.²⁰ Finally, and in conjunction with the previous two points, citizens can lobby governments to pursue better planning and legislation by creating a social context where it is okay for decision-makers to say no and where the responsibilities to minimize violence and to practice care cannot be offset to another place.

Biodiversity offsetting currently enables development and lessens the responsibilities of “developers” (and their governing bodies and legal orders) to care for the places in which it occurs, outsourcing care as if one place were fungible with another. Carbon offsetting, which generally relies on the fiction that carbon stored in the ephemeral, flammable biosphere is equivalent to carbon in the geosphere, has a similar tendency to legitimate fossil fuel use. Since the central function of offsetting appears to be that of legitimating development, it is hard to see how this mechanism is a fitting response to catastrophic global environmental change. As such, it should be rejected, with efforts focused on the urgent task of nurturing place-based connectivity, care, and responsibility and of upholding Indigenous sovereignties where they are impinged on by settler-colonial states.

Acknowledgments

Authorship is in alphabetical order. The authorship team is part of a research group that makes roughly equal contributions to the development of shared ideas.

Notes

References