Governing for “no net loss” of biodiversity over the long term: challenges and pathways forward

Economic development is increasingly impacting biodiversity, leading to a rise in biodiversity offset policies globally that aim to compensate for biodiversity losses. Many developments generating offsets create long-term, irreversible losses of biodiversity and, therefore, require biodiversity gains from offsets to be retained over the long term to have any hope of achieving “no net loss” (NNL) of biodiversity. This raises important ecological and institutional challenges that current offset mechanisms, built for politico-economic systems with short-term policy horizons, do not sufficiently consider. We explore this issue and discuss several responses to the problem ranging from incremental changes for improving on-ground management, through to major governance shifts required to support the long-term social-ecological resilience of offset sites. We argue that without these changes, at best, NNL policies participate in temporarily reducing permanent biodiversity loss. At worst, they participate in a false promise, distracting institutions from the transformative changes needed to reverse biodiversity depletion.