The Darwin woodland is home to endangered species and important for the Larrakia people. The development approval requires habitat offsets – yet the minister herself has publicly doubted offsets work.
Offsets are meant to restore land elsewhere to make up for lost habitat. Developers can make payments to the state to cover the costs of this work, but a new study finds there’s usually a shortfall.
The nature repair market is sold as a good news story: willing land managers benefiting nature with support from the private sector. But if offsets are part of it, the reality could be very different.
The deteriorating Western Grassland Reserve in Victoria represents a failure of imagination. When the grasslands are steeped with history and culture, imagine its potential.
Australian cities are home to many threatened species but are also where biodiversity is being destroyed by development. But what if planning and design processes built nature into the urban fabric?
When the Hume Highway was widened, hundreds of nest boxes were installed to replace habitat for three threatened species. Four years of monitoring has concluded the program is entirely unsuccessful.
NSW has nearly 300 threatened animal species, including koalas and pygmy-possums. Yet we still don’t know the government’s plans in one area that could pose a serious threat to NSW’s wildlife.
“Biodiversity offsetting” – protecting animals and plants in one area to make up for negative impacts in another – is increasingly used by companies such as mining firms, as a way to boost their corporate…
The threat to Britain’s ancient woodland has been much discussed recently, the suggestion being that where they are lost to housing development they might be replaced with new woods through biodiversity…
In its report published last week, the UK Parliament’s green watchdog, the Environmental Audit Committee, was far from convinced by the government’s proposed policy of biodiversity offsetting. The committee’s…