What options really exist to address environmental harm

I find myself in a lot of discussions about permitting, climate solutions, environmental markets, and ecosystem credits where eventually someone says they are against "offsets."

I'll just say that I find that incomprehensible because its hard to understand what the alternative could be to asking organizations to compensate for a damage they cause to a public, community, protected, or valued environmental resource. I've been trying to figure out why and to ask myself - and challenge others - to clarify the real options that exist.

So this is the first of three posts I am going to do on this subject. This one just describes the options when there is a potential harm. The second one will dive into more of the types of compensation that could be used and what happens when those types of compensation are used in the real world. The third will go into more detail on what offsets mean and how they are one of the approaches that can allow stronger enforcement, more avoidance, and iteratively better results over time.

What happens when environmental damage will occur

I only know of three options in government or corporate policy or individual action when a potential project will cause environmental harm.

Ignore it.

Simply ignoring the impact remains the most likely choice everywhere in the world. In any country, one could intentionally or mistakenly eradicate any of the 90% of species that are obscure invertebrates or similar organisms without anyone knowing or asking unless there is already a permit or procedural requirement triggered by something else. In the US, the Supreme Court has made it possible to destroy more than 50% of wetlands in many states that were previously protected. This is true in both the developed and the developing world. Most of the time, regulatory systems are blind to damage (i.e. no one even asks about or documents it) or at minimum just require documentation of the damage that will occur. The vast majority of environmental harm happens without any pause, process, or permit.

Both of the other two options exist after an effort to try to minimize some of the damage. Minimization is almost a reflexive response. We do it all the time. Individuals or businesses themselves do it without any regulation and many thoughtful regulations and corporate CSR policies drive lots of avoidance and minimization. However, if there is still environmental harm that is likely to occur, what are the options?

Just say no.

If environmental damage will still occur after avoidance and minimization, government, a corporate policy, or the project team itself could reject the project. However, this is mostly a theoretical option. Under government systems, in all but a few, usually highly contested and public cases, government rarely says no to a project that cannot avoid all its impacts. Effectively, what remains is ignored. Mining, transmission, the construction of a school, clearing of land for agriculture, operation of an ongoing farm that always causes some biodiversity harm, runoff into waterways from a housing estate... all of these activities and thousands of other activities cause harm. Rarely do those activities get ended because of it. I can't think of any democracy, authoritarian, developed, developing, or other governance system where that is not mostly true. It helps if we can call the damage 'insignificant' which is what happens a lot, regardless of whether its true, especially if no one is forced to look at the big picture of cumulative impacts.

Compensate.

Lastly, the only other option that exists is to ask or require the project proponent to compensate for the environmental harm that remains. Compensation could come in lots of forms, with or without quantification:

• A fee or tax system that creates revenue that goes to something (related to the project impacts or not).
• Negotiated payments to a community that most suffers from the environmental damage that will occur.
• Legal action and settlements that kick into gear once damage can be demonstrated.
• One time payments made to a set of projects or activities carried out by government or nonprofits, made before or after the damage occurs.

Offsets and insets are one kind of compensation, and its my belief that those terms should only be used when the impact has been quantified and when the actions to be taken have been quantified. Insetting is the term used when compensatory actions occur on the project site or another area the project proponent controls. Offsetting is the term used when compensatory actions are paid for by the project proponent, but carried elsewhere and by an entity that specializes in delivering those kinds of actions successfully.

So when someone says they oppose offsets....

What I often hear next is that they believe that it is only because of the allowance for compensation as an option that government says 'yes' to a project. If only compensation weren't allowed, government would say no. The problem is that there is no evidence that is true anywhere in the world for any program, except in a small set of highly contested cases. Government and communities simply cannot say 'no' to all the schools, roads, factories, energy facilities, farms and everything else what we depend upon, especially with a rapidly growing middle class all around the world.

Sometimes what I hear is that its not that they oppose compensation, rather they oppose it being given to a third party (especially a for profit one) and they feel more comfortable giving the money to government. And that is a subject for a future post....