Abstract | Biodiversityoffsets in New Zealand: How should we measure their effectiveness?

In recent years, biodiversity offsetting has emerged as a promising but sometimes contentious tool for managing adverse effects on biodiversity around the world. Ambiguity over how offsetting should be implemented, monitored and enforced continues to limit the tool’s effectiveness. In New Zealand, this uncertainty has been compounded by confusion around how biodiversity offsetting intersects with the requirement under the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) to avoid, remedy or mitigate for the adverse effects of activities. This issue has been recognised by the Regional Councils BioManagers Group – a special interest group formed to improve collaboration between regional councils and unitary authorities on biosecurity and biodiversity management. To help address the issue, BioManagers have funded a project to provide national-level guidance on how to effectively use offsetting to maintain biodiversity values under the RMA. This talk will foreshadow a selection of topics from this guidance, drawing attention to the opportunities to use offsetting to obtain better outcomes for biodiversity under the RMA. It will also speak to the risks and limitations of this tool, pointing to some of the circumstances in which offsetting may not be appropriate. In doing so, it grapples with many of the longstanding questions surrounding offsetting: how and what must we measure to ensure no net biodiversity loss? How do we account for the cumulative and the unknown? And how do we know if we’ve been successful?

Dr Jamie Steer MEIANZ

Over the past 15 years Dr Jamie Steer has researched and worked in a range of different roles in the environmental services industry, including as an ecologist for an environmental design consultancy. He has a MSc in Ecology & Biodiversity from Victoria University and a PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Auckland. Jamie has published papers on behavioural ecology, bioacoustics and the history of science. More recently, he has been active publishing popular environmental articles in newspapers, blogs and magazines. He works as a Senior Biodiversity Advisor for the Biodiversity department at Greater Wellington Regional Council.