Around the world, ecosystems and the communities that depend on them are harmed by large infrastructure projects, extractive industries and new financial markets. To facilitate these activities, public and private entities are promoting new schemes to allow their environmental impacts to be "offset". This could lead to an increase in damage, but even more concerning is that it commodifies nature. This is why the undersigned organisations are warning the world of the negative impacts of this false solution and saying "No to Biodiversity Offsetting."

Biodiversity offsetting is the promise to replace nature destroyed and lost in one place with nature somewhere else. As with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and schemes to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), biodiversity offsetting relies on "experts" to create dubious calculations that claim to make one piece of the earth equal to another. It pretends you can trade places.

Who really benefits?

The introduction of biodiversity offsetting allows, or even encourages, environmental destruction with the promise that the habitat can be recreated elsewhere. This is beneficial to the companies doing the damage, since they can present themselves as a company that invests in environmental protection, thereby green-washing its products and services.

It also creates new business opportunities for intermediaries: conservation consultants to calculate what is lost, bankers to turn them into credits, traders to barter and speculate on them in new specialised markets and investors who want to profit from so called "natural capital". "Natural capital" is an artificial concept based on questionable economic assumptions rather than ecological values that permits the commodification of nature.

All of this is happening with the strong involvement of state governments who are creating public policies to ensure that property rights over elements of nature such as carbon or biodiversity can be transferred to corporations and banks.

Complete statemente and further informations:

http://no-biodiversity-offsets.makenoise.org/