Govt response to BNG consultation out:
✅good commitment to LPA resourcing✅tackling pre-emptive degradation ✅avoided the worst unrestricted credit stacking
❌letting dev's sell on-site 'excess' gains❌no transparent unit pricing❌no register for on-site (ie most biodv gains!) ✅ Gonna increase financing for LPAs to £16m this year in prep of Nov 2023. Was previously gonna be ~£4.8m, so this is good- addressing in my view the biggest issue with BNG - lack of LPA resourcing (as of 2021 39% of LPAs had *any* in house ecological expertise). Is it enough?🤷‍♂️

Can England build all the homes the govt says we need *whilst* staying within our carbon budget & achieving national biodiversity policy goals?

The answer's 🤯

“A home for all within planetary boundaries” – our new paper in Ecological Economics
sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Mega 🧵:
Turns out it's too complex & interesting for any one field. So worked with amazing team of housing economist @jryancollins, political economist @CorletWalker, biodiversity scientists @wildbusiness @mattiacmancini & industrial ecologists @MichalDrewniok & Andre Serrenho

I’ve spent the last 3.5 years researching how to resolve contradictions between Sust Dev Goal 9 (expand infrastructure networks) & SDG14/15 (protect ecosystems & wildlife). Here’s the summary of my PhD analysing this epic problem 🧵 /1 Built infra is currently proliferating around the world at fastest rate in history. If we built all the infra that’s projected using business-as-usual practices, the planet’s stuffed - the emissions from just building it all use up basically our whole carbon budget /2

Huge paper led by @wildbusiness out yesterday: what does it take for a large organisation to genuinely achieve net positive outcomes for biodiversity?

nature.com/articles/d4158… Lots of large organisations are making biodiversity commitments that sound great ("nature positive", "net gain" etc.), but without ways of measuring progress towards these goals, there's a risk they don't mean anything.

Can England build all the homes the govt says we need *whilst* staying within our carbon budget & achieving national biodiversity policy goals?

The answer's 🤯

So excited to share what we’ve been working on for the last year – our new Preprint osf.io/5kxce/

Mega 🧵: Turns out it's too complex & interesting for any one field to answer. So worked with amazing team of housing economist @jryancollins, ecological economist @CorletWalker, biodiversity scientists @wildbusiness @mattiacmancini & industrial ecologists @MichalDrewniok & Andre Serrenho

Although not the most important thing right now, policymaking doesn't stop for global crises: the Biodiversity Net Gain #BNG consultation is open. I urge everyone who cares about English nature to respond. My consult recommendations based on our research conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…: Q33. Do you agree that developers which are able to exceed the biodiversity gain objective for a given development should be allowed to use or sell the excess biodiversity units as off-site gains for another development, provided there is genuine additionality?

As new Biodiversity Net Gain #BNG consultation comes out today, here's where I stand on 5 key controversies based on our work building & analysing the Biodiversity Net Gain database looking at the effects of the policy using real data (e.g. in our paper conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…) 1) Stacking and bundling. It is in the best interest of landholders producing biodiversity units to allow stacking, as they call sell multiple credit streams from the same restoration efforts. But my take: this is actually not what's best for the policy as a whole - here's why

Our (@DICE_Kent @wildbusiness & team) evaluation of England's biodv compensation policy 'Biodiversity Net Gain' is out in @ConLetters, adding to academic lit evaluating outcomes of biodv compensation systems conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…. Takeaways for academic #offsetting peeps: 🧵 This adds to the relatively few jurisdictional evaluations that use real data, such as Gibbons et al. 2018 for New South Wales onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…, & classic work in Canada by Quigley & Harper link.springer.com/content/pdf/10…

Biodiversity Net Gain. Wish there was actual, empirical evidence about what it might really mean for your company/local authority/England’s nature?

Our @DICE_Kent-led new paper in @ConLetters reports the results of the 1st evaluation of #BNG conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…. Monster🧵 TLDR: Under #BNG, we lose open greenspace, traded for promises to deliver smaller, higher quality habitats in future. Offset system might be tiny: 95% of units in our sample delivered within development footprints themselves. Governance & the Metric need URGENT improvement.

As an academic working on understanding & how to get the best possible nature outcomes for #Biodiversity #NetGain #BNG, let me share a major worry that I see barely discussed at all, & which unaddressed could decimate the biodiversity impacts: 'cost-shifting'. /1 Cost-shifting occurs when an offsetting / biodv compensation policy is introduced under the rationale that nature conservation is underfunded, so we need new private finance to make up the shortfall. So, we set up offsetting to charge developers for their biodv impacts. /2

As mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain inches closer, update all on what the data says the impacts of #BNG will currently be on England's nature, without further changes. 📢📢📢Updated results of our database of all development projects within councils with Net Gain policies 📢📢 /1 Database now spans ~6000 new homes & industrial, research, transport, energy, & health/social care infrastructures; ~800 individual habitat patches. It's now a pretty good picture of where #BNG is leading. Built with @wildbusiness & team of wonderful forward-thinking planners /2