Biodiversity Offsets: Incentivizing Conservation for Managing Business Impacts

Bad management can never lead to good development decisions. This also holds true for conservation and management of biodiversity and ecosystem benefits that lie at the heart of sound development practice and central to solving environmental crises. Conserving biodiversity becomes even more relevant in the context of developing and emerging economies where the dependence on bio-resources is disproportionately high for sustaining economy and buffering humanity from environmental risks and hazards. Significant inroads into monetization of biodiversity provides convincing ground in favor of exercising options to prevent ‘no net loss’ and promote ‘a positive gain’ of the natural capital, vital for life and ascending trajectory of economic growth. Corporate groups and resource managers must explore ‘out of the box’ solutions to address the existing and potential threats to biodiversity linked to business actions that are rationalized as ‘unavoidable for economic growth’. Just as incentives are important in business management as mechanisms that shape human and collective actions, offsets are being globally accepted as development-led conservation actions for incentivizing biodiversity conservation through business initiatives, especially when the ‘traditional’ conservation approaches are not always effective. Based on accumulating experience, biodiversity offsets have not only become saleable business drivers but are also being recognized as innovative and forward-looking solutions to resolve conservation–development conflicts in the developed, developing, and emerging economies.