Principles of the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme

In 2004, Forest Trends established the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP) to bring together a large group of organisations to challenge the historical assumption that the social and economic benefits of development projects must inevitably result in a net loss of biodiversity. At the time, companies were beginning to acknowledge that the trade-off between economic growth and environmental outcomes was increasingly unacceptable to investors and civil society. Governments were looking for practical ways to reconcile their sustainable development targets with biodiversity conservation. Financial institutions wanted to find ways to safeguard their investments against social and environmental risks. Indigenous peoples and local communities wanted to ensure that new projects were developed with their prior and informed consent and reflected their needs and priorities. The conservation community and scientists aimed to improve the manner in which losses and gains of biodiversity and ecosystem services were measured, managed and monitored and to ensure that conservation priorities and land-use planning were based on sound science. All of them faced challenges in making progress with these goals. The terminology for core concepts such as ‘mitigation‘, ‘compensation’ and ‘offsets’ varied from country to country and group to group, leading to confusion and misunderstanding during discussions; guidelines, methodologies and standards were lacking; proposals for improved approaches hadn’t been tested and demonstrated at pilot sites; and government policies and financial investment conditions did not necessarily encourage best practice. With this in mind, 40 representatives from companies, governments, non-governmental organisations and financial institutions joined BBOP; a group that has now grown to over 80 members, with a Secretariat provided by Forest Trends and WCS. The plan was to develop and test the principles, standards and methods needed to demonstrate no net loss of biodiversity in the context of development projects.