Back in October I posted about a report I’d written that considered Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and what it could mean for pollinators. The report generated some interest and has helped to inform a study by University of Oxford PhD researcher Natalie (Nat) Duffus that has just been posted as a pre-print entitled “Leveraging Biodiversity Net Gain to address invertebrate declines in England” – here’s the link to it: https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/6667/

In this work, Nat has asked a group of us who are interested in this topic to assess the limitations of the current BNG system and how it might be improved to better support invertebrate populations. Please do read the study and comment either on the blog or directly on the pre-print. We’re interested in people’s views on this and whether we have missed anything important.

Here’s the abstract:

Meeting ambitions such as the Global Biodiversity Framework 2030 targets will require multiple conservation mechanisms that benefit the widest possible range of habitats and species. Using England as a case study, here we evaluate the likely impact of a novel and ambitious ecological compensation policy, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), on terrestrial insects, spiders, and other arthropods (‘invertebrates’), a functionally important but rapidly declining component of biodiversity. Current implementation of BNG in England sets out to provide a 10% uplift in biodiversity when infrastructure development (such as housebuilding) occurs. However, BNG is a habitat-driven approach, which risks overlooking important considerations relevant to invertebrate conservation, threatens to further reduce the size and quality of their habitats, and may increase habitat fragmentation. BNG – as currently implemented – therefore represents a missed opportunity to use a universally applied policy to benefit invertebrates and other functionally important components of biodiversity. We suggest ways forward to realign BNG with what we know to be crucial for successful invertebrate conservation, and with other policy mechanisms such as the National Pollinator Strategy. This will ensure that appropriate habitats and conditions for invertebrates are retained, enhanced, and created at a landscape scale, and that BNG is optimised to contribute to broader national conservation targets. As biodiversity accounting and offsetting schemes such as BNG are increasingly adopted around the world, the experience of BNG in England provides valuable insights into how ecological compensation programmes could be better designed, implemented, and monitored to ensure that benefits for a wide variety of taxa are achieved.