OPERAs webinar 5 question Hyeonju Ryu

Does NNL mean 'no net loss in ecosystem services'? If it's the case, the concept of NNL may neglect the fact that there is a certain degree of requirement/demand for each ecosystem service or thresholds to sustain a society.

Comments

I mention that even when speaking about no net loss of biodiversity which is where most practice actually currently originates from, the question remains what biodiversity are we actually talking about? Is it species, and which species? Is it a particular type of ecosystem? So actually the need to disaggregate and to be more specific about the actual features for which you want to achieve no net loss is a question that needs to be addressed every time. So including ecosystem services, possibly only means adding extra features to include in the framework. So they can be managed that way. However, what the question expresses is also an important risk if the policy shifts from biodiversity and ecosystem services to simply ecosystem services. The some of the requirements may be relaxed because ecosystem services typically are more substitutable than a particular species or a particular habitat type. So that relaxes one of the requirements of offsets which would be the like for like requirement where if you were impacting a particular species then offsets have to benefit that same species.

Posted on: 25 Oct 2017 - 15:01