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Reviewing the role of habitat banking and tradable development rights in the conservation policy mix

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2015

RUI SANTOS ,
CHRISTOPH SCHRÖTER-SCHLAACK ,
PAULA ANTUNES Open the ORCID record for PAULA ANTUNES [Opens in a new window] ,
IRENE RING  and
PEDRO CLEMENTE
RUI SANTOS*
Affiliation:
CENSE (Centre for Environmental and Sustainability Research), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
CHRISTOPH SCHRÖTER-SCHLAACK
Affiliation:
UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
PAULA ANTUNES
Affiliation:
CENSE (Centre for Environmental and Sustainability Research), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
IRENE RING
Affiliation:
UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany Institute of Public Finance and Public Management, University of Leipzig, Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
PEDRO CLEMENTE
Affiliation:
CENSE (Centre for Environmental and Sustainability Research), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
*
*Correspondence: Dr Rui Santos e-mail: rfs@fct.unl.pt
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Summary

Habitat banking and tradable development rights (TDR) have gained considerable currency as a way of achieving ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity and of reconciling nature conservation with economic development goals. This paper reviews the use of these instruments for biodiversity conservation and assesses their roles in the policy mix. The two instruments are compared in terms of effectiveness, cost effectiveness, social impact, institutional context and legal requirements. The role in the policy mix is discussed highlighting sequential relationships, as well as complementarities or synergies, redundancy and conflicts with other instruments, such as biodiversity offsets and land-use zoning.

Habitat banking and TDR have the potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation objectives and attain cost-effective solutions with positive social impacts on local communities and landowners. They can also help to create a new mind-set more favourable to public-private cooperation in biodiversity conservation. At the same time, these policy instruments face a number of theoretical and implementation challenges, such as additionality and equivalence of offsets, endurance of land-use planning regulations, monitoring of offset performance, or time lags between restoration and resulting conservation benefits.

A clear, enforceable regulatory approach is a prerequisite for the success of habitat banking and TDR. In return, these schemes provide powerful incentives for compliance with regulatory norms and ensure a more equitable allocation of the benefits and costs of land-use controls and conservation. Environmentally harmful subsidies in other policy sectors as well as alternative offset options, however, reduce the attractiveness and effectiveness of these instruments. Thus, the overall performance of habitat banking and TDR hinges on how they are integrated into the biodiversity conservation policy mix and fine-tuned with other sectoral policies.

Keywords

biodiversity conservationbiodiversity offsetshabitat bankinginstrument rolesland-use zoningpolicy mixtradable development rights
Type
Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 42 , Issue 4: Thematic section: Tradable Rights in Conservation , December 2015 , pp. 294 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2015 

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