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The Queensland Government is reforming environmental offsetting arrangements by creating a new Environmental Offsets Act 2014 which if created, will significantly streamline and simplify the delivery of environmental offsets and improve environmental outcomes. The discussion paper details key improvements to the existing legislative environment and references sections in both the draft Regulation and the Bill, and the Financial Settlement Offset Calculation, Methodology specifies the calculation methodology that calculates the financial settlement for an environmental offset.
We are witnessing an alarming, global biodiversity crisis with an ongoing loss of species and their habitats. In response, a number of tools and approaches – including some that are contested – are being explored and promoted. Biodiversity offsets are one such approach, and deserve critical examination since the debate surrounding them has often been oversimplified and lacking practical evidence. As such, this study presents a refined typology including seven types of biodiversity offsets and taking into account different contexts, governance arrangements and drivers. It draws on a detailed analysis of theoretical concepts to explain the voluntary implementation of biodiversity offsets using an internet-based (netnographic) research approach. Furthermore it builds on a broad global explorative base of 72 practical examples and presents in-depth case studies for each type. The results reveal a number of global tendencies that allow recommendations to be made for different locations, contexts and stakeholders. They also encourage the expansion of this research field to respond to the pressing needs of policy and practice.
The Lilliputians of Environmental Regulation offers a unique perspective about an understudied aspect of environmental policy, by sharing the stories of the front-line regulators that implement policy on a day-to-day basis in the United States.
Environmental policies have traditionally relied on direct controls and on government investment to protect natural resources. Today, the drawbacks and impediments to this approach are evident: heavy burdens borne by companies and the community, complex regulations, a danger of legislative inflation, difficulties in meeting the goals set, to name a few. In response, the environmental authorities in many countries have begun to reassess the efficacy of their programs, with the result that market incentives and voluntary agreements with companies or branches of industry have been added to the arsenal of traditional environmental protection measures. There are great expectations for new economic instruments, which offer the twofold advantage of giving companies more freedom in the choice of means, and of increasing the chances for meeting goals in a more cost-effective way. The authors of this book analyse these instruments - green taxes, tradeable permits, covenants, joint implementation, internationally tradeable quotas - from the point of view of costeffectiveness, their ability to achieve environmental goals, and public and corporate acceptability. They endeavour to determine on the basis of experience to date, whether these instruments are living up to the hopes placed in them.
The conservation of biodiversity is a daunting and complex public policy challenge. Over the past three decades, two clear themes have emerged in conservation science, policy and practice: greater experimentation with market-based policy instruments (MBIs); and an increased concern over the effectiveness of conservation policies. These two themes are interrelated, as a key driver of the rise in prominence of MBIs has been the promise of more effective, efficient and equitable conservation than that which is possible under 'traditional' regulatory approaches. However, scarce evidence is available on the efficacy of regulatory policies and MBIs alike, and it has been argued that "better theory, better methods, and better data" are required if conservation policies are to be more frequently and rigorously evaluated for effectiveness. This focus on the technical challenges of policy evaluation is incomplete, as effectiveness of conservation policy is influenced not only by the choice of policy instrument or combination thereof, but also the actors involved, the relevant institutional, social and political contexts, and decisions made at various stages of the policy process. In this thesis, I investigate the challenges and complexities associated with conservation policy in Australia, an advanced and politically stable economy. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, I consider regulatory and market-based policy responses to a major driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, and evaluate what outcomes, opportunities and risks these policies present for conservation. In Chapter Two, I document the recent shift away from 'command and control' policy responses to deforestation in Australia, and towards self-regulation and MBIs. Despite this change in policy style, little is known of their efficacy. In Chapter Three, I use a spatially explicit bent-cable regression model to evaluate what effect regulatory policies have had on the rate of deforestation in Queensland, Australia. I find some evidence of a policy effect after adjusting for covariates, but extreme variation in regional deforestation trends reduces this effect at the state level. In Chapter Four, I present findings which confirm that carbon farming is economically viable in degraded Queensland agricultural landscapes under an estimated $5 t CO2e-1 carbon price. In practice however, large-scale reforestation has not occurred despite being the 'rational' option, in part due to policy complexity and political uncertainty. In the final three empirical chapters, I consider challenges in the design, implementation and evaluation of biodiversity offset policy. In Chapter Five I describe a mathematical framework used to underpin the Australian Environmental Offsets Policy, which was designed to deliver 'no net loss' outcomes for protected matters. I subsequently illustrate in Chapters Six and Seven that improvements to policy design do not necessarily lead to better policy outcomes, due to complexities that emerge through policy implementation in the context of multi-actor, multi-level environmental governance. I draw on qualitative data from interviews with key informants to describe potential risks to biodiversity outcomes under current offset policy settings, including: ambiguous responsibility for long term security and management, fragmentation within government departments at the federal and state levels, and a lack of transparency and public accountability. I conclude the thesis and provide future research directions in Chapter Eight.
The two distinct approaches to environmental policy include direct regulation-sometimes called 'command and control' policies-and regulation by economic, or market-based incentives. This book is the first to compare the costs and outcomes of these approaches by examining realworld applications. In a unique format, paired case studies from the United States and Europe contrast direct regulation on one side of the Atlantic with an incentivebased policy on the other. For example, Germany‘s direct regulation of SO2 emissions is compared with an incentive approach in the U.S. Direct regulation of water pollution via the U.S. Clean Water Act is contrasted with Hollands incentive-based fee system. Additional studies contrast solutions for eliminating leaded gasoline and reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, CFCs, and chlorinated solvents. The cases presented in Choosing Environmental Policy were selected to allow the sharpest, most direct comparisons of direct regulation and incentive-based strategies. In practice, environmental policy is often a mix of both types of instruments. This innovative investigation will interest scholars, students, and policymakers who want more precise information as to what kind of 'blend' will yield the most effective policy. Are incentive instruments more efficient than regulatory ones? Do regulatory policies necessarily have higher administrative costs? Are incentive policies more difficult to monitor? Are firms more likely to oppose market-based instruments or traditional regulation? These are some of the important questions the authors address, often with surprising results.
Over the last decade, market-based incentives have become the regulatory tool of choice when trying to solve difficult environmental problems. Evidence of their dominance can be seen in recent proposals for addressing global warming (through an emissions trading scheme in the Kyoto Protocol) and for amending the Clean Air Act (to add a new emissions trading systems for smog precursors and mercury--the Bush administration's "Clear Skies" program). They are widely viewed as more efficient than traditional command and control regulation. This collection of essays takes a critical look at this question, and evaluates whether the promises of market-based regulation have been fulfilled. Contributors put forth the ideas that few regulatory instruments are actually purely market-based, or purely prescriptive, and that both approaches can be systematically undermined by insufficiently careful design and by failures of monitoring and enforcement. All in all, the essays recommend future research that no longer pits one kind of approach against the other, but instead examines their interaction and compatibility. This book should appeal to academics in environmental economics and law, along with policymakers in government agencies and advocates in non-governmental organizations.