Nature provides spiritual and artistic inspiration that enriches our lives. Intact ecosystems regulate the climate, purify air and water, mitigate floods and droughts, and provide food.

Unchecked development puts these gifts of nature to humans at risk. Development causes the extinction of plants and animals—biodiversity loss. Can development and biodiversity co-exist?

One proposal is “biodiversity offsets.” A widely cited 2013 article by Joseph Bull and coworkers defines these as follows: Where a new development will affect existing biodiversity, “create or restore additional comparable biodiversity elsewhere, resulting in no net loss.”

But too much biodiversity has already been lost. Where development occurred in the past, huge portions of the Earth’s land surface were stripped of their natural vegetation. Scientists warn that safe limits for human survival–tipping points–have been exceeded.

Bull and his coworkers say that biodiversity offsets require “accurate quantification of losses and gains, and therefore require robust metrics.” They claim that the use of simple metrics such as ‘area of habitat’ to represent biodiversity losses and gains has been “widely discredited.” As in nearly all scientific papers, they call for more research.

Research is great, but we’re running out of time. Prompt, effective, and universal action is needed. I take issue with the claim that ‘area of habitat’ has been discredited as a metric.

Here’s my proposal: Any development would trigger a requirement to conserve and restore nature, through........

© rabble