Aligning ecological compensation policies with the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to achieve real net gain in biodiversity

Increasingly, government and corporate policies on ecological compensation (e.g. offsetting) are requiring ‘net gain’ outcomes for biodiversity. This presents an opportunity to align development with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’s (GBF) ambition for overall biodiversity recovery. In this perspective, we describe three conditions that should be accounted for in establishing or revising net gain policies to align their outcomes with the Post-2020 GBF: namely, a requirement for residual losses from development to be compensated for by (1) absolute gains, which are (2) scaled to the achievement of explicit biodiversity targets, where (3) gains are ecologically feasible. We show that few current policies meet these conditions, and thus we demonstrate a major disconnect between existing biodiversity net gain approaches and the achievement of the Post-2020 GBF milestones and goals. We conclude by describing how this gap can be bridged through a novel ecological compensation framework.