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Nature by numbers – NEW PODCAST
It was super cool to be on one of my favourite pods, The Eco Chamber, last week to discuss the impacts of recent changes in BNG: https://lnkd.in/daUqqhec. I basically highlighted that the new small sites threshold was lower than government had previously suggested, which Natalie Duffus’s work shows will still pull a substantial chunk of demand out of the already pretty demand-constrained market, but not as much as people feared. Then we discussed some of Alice Stuart’s points about how when NSIPs enter the BNG system, it is likely to flip from being a market that predominantly sells to private buyers and housebuilders to one that predominantly sells to NSIPs – which are funded by taxpayers.
But there’s a few other important things going on in BNG right now from an ecological perspective that Natalie Duffus Alice Stuart & I in the N+ Hub & The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery BNG team are also keeping an eye on. 1) the push towards temporal stacking, allowing units that have apparently reached their target condition early get re-baselined and new units be designated from that point on. So the case in favor of credit stacking is that it allows conservation gains to be protected in the longer term (ie beyond 30 years) and allows BNG providers to get more money from less land. The case against is that it means more and more demand can be satisfied from less and less land. Plus, the condition scores are fundamentally gameable, so relying on a private consultant paid by a habitat banker to tell us when a certain condition has been achieved and allowing habitat banks to accrue more revenue from that point onwards seems to me to have pretty serious ecological and governance risks involved. Remember, the best publicly available information suggests that BNG is very demand-constrained (~7% of the off-site network has sold; although we don’t have access to the private information of habitat banking industry, so it’s not impossible we’re wrong). But if it is super demand-constrained, then allowing incumbent habitat banks to produce more and more units from the same area of land, I think, comes with the big risk of essentially minimizing the conservation impact of BNG by allowing BNG liabilities to be satisfied on much less land.
2) seeing some habitat banks go live, where the main intervention that they’re funding is switching from sheep grazing to cattle grazing. And again, although I understand this is potentially better for the local ecology, there are system level effects which are not being captured there. And also, is it really in the spirit of BNG to pay farmers to switch between livestock types and remain a productive farm, or is it more in the spirit of BNG to take land out of production and allocate it for nature? These both involve complex value judgments, so there is no right and wrong, but we’re keeping an eye on these and are definitely flagging these as risks to the ecology community.