The New Fair Metric

The New Fair Metric attempts to achieve environmental justice through public participation.

 

Biodiversity offsetting, within the mitigation hierarchy, is supposed to be a last resort solution once avoidance, minimisation and restoration solutions are exhausted. However, in an urbanising, growth-centric economy, biodiversity offsetting is being utilised as a means to accelerate development. The British government and by extension the Department on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), facilitate such development by enforcing an overly simplistic offsetting metric; accelerating the time in which developments are approved and reducing transaction costs for developers.

 

It is widely accepted that ecosystems have multiple interdependent services; regulating, supporting, provisioning and cultural. Under this framework, the current DEFRA approved metric ignores the potential fulfilment opportunities, spiritual value and cognitive development that ecosystems provide. The New Fair Metric attempts to tackle this through devising a novel methodology which utilises public participation in order to quantify an area’s socio-cultural value.

 

The basis for the New Fair Metric came about following our evaluation of the environmental impacts of High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) and the developer’s proposed strategies for ensuring environmental protection. Whilst we can appreciate that HS2 and its proposed protection program has been approved by both DEFRA and government, it is our aim to ensure that future development projects achieve greater socio-cultural and environmental justice.

Our mission to improve the offsetting metric, making it more equitable and environmentally conscious, has three central aims;

 

1. Ensure that the public are part of the planning process from the beginning and that their input on the importance of an ecosystem is fully considered.  
    

2. Improve the enforcement of socio-environmental justice through increasing the required number of ‘biodiversity units’ developers are required to compensate for in parallel with the socio-cultural importance of an ecosystem.
    

3. Disincentivise developers from instinctively seeking biodiversity offsetting strategies as a form of immediate solution. This will be done through market-driven forces; namely the increased transaction costs of conducting increasingly complex offsetting calculations and the increased number of biodiversity units required.

 

This website aims to be a platform to share the New Fair Metric and surrounding policy framework. Public support with our mission in lobbying for our new, more equitable metric, to be utilised for future developments is essential.
We hope that this website provides you with an insight into both the importance of valuing the socio-cultural provisions of our ecosystems as well as the need to hold government and developers to account when considering how development impacts our environment.