The New Fair Metric
THE PROPOSED METRIC
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How do you go about quantifying an area’s socio-cultural value? In order for a more representative and equitable figure for biodiversity offsetting units to be calculated, this question had to be tackled. Understandably, the value of an area in terms of its social and cultural importance is subjective to each individual depending on their relationship with nature itself, the frequency with which they use such an area and the memories and relationship they hold in association to it.
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THE CURRENT METRIC
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The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is the current designer of biodiversity offsetting metric in the UK. The offsetting step also called compensation step is found at the end of the mitigation hierarchy, designed to classify the different steps that a developer needs to go through before starting a project.
HOW OUR METRIC IS ADDING VALUE?
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The developers of the current offsetting metric state that ‘ensuring no net loss of biodiversity’¹ is the core value of their Proposed Scheme. Although the scope of the construction will affect fundamental natural habitats and species, they claim that through creating ‘biodiversity units’ and comparing the ‘biodiversity value of habitats created and the habitats lost’¹ , they make the biodiversity offsetting metric environmentally just.