SYMP 21-2
Payments, certifications, and offsets: Using practical approaches to understanding impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services
The many different values of biodiversity and ecosystem services are increasingly being recognized, quantified, and integrated into decision making frameworks of corporations, Governments, and communities. A major component of efforts aimed at measuring and valuing ecosystem services is focused on understanding and mitigating the trade-offs across services that result from different practices or policies, and the concomitant impacts on different elements of human well-being, across different social groups, and across different scales. Several approaches have emerged for minimizing the negative impacts of different types of ecosystem service trade-offs, however, there is a need to critically examine how these approaches ameliorate the multiple types of tradeoffs that may occur as a result of different conservation and development decisions. Thus, this study evaluates the effectiveness of commonly used approaches such as PES, certification schemes, and biodiversity offsets for mitigating negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem service loss and degradation. Specifically, the study asks: 1) how are these different approaches selected as mechanisms for reducing impacts; 2) how is the mitigation of impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services measured; and 3) how well and under what conditions do these different mechanisms most effectively mitigate impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services?
Results/Conclusions
We assess how different initiatives have identified the trade-offs in BES that may result from different practices or policies, how different approaches have been selected and implemented, and monitored with respect to outcomes. The discussion will explore the conditions that influence the effectiveness of various mitigation approaches and some of the challenges and opportunities of using different approaches for addressing the full suite of tradeoffs that may occur as a result of environmental degradation or conservation.