A new article ‘Nature Positive’ must incorporate, not undermine, the mitigation hierarchy was recently published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. The team of authors, led by Martine Maron, involved several COMBO team members and collaborators.
The paper is available here and a free to read version here.
It highlights three fundamental requirements:
- First, it is essential to apply the mitigation hierarchy to address any predicted impacts on biodiversity at the development project level and especially first to avoid impacts to the greatest extent possible.
- Second, it is also crucial to expand use of the mitigation hierarchy to supply chains. This is where a large portion of businesses’ impacts tend to lie. Again, the emphasis needs to be on finding effective leverage points of avoiding impacts in the first place.
- Last, to ensure there is more nature in the future than now, it is necessary to undo past degradation and loss by implementing conservation actions (for example landscape restoration) in addition to the mitigation measures already accounted for. This last step is where voluntary biodiversity / nature credits, that are currently much discussed (e.g. as part of the Verra Consultation on the draft Nature Framework and the Biodiversity Credit Alliance), fit in. These ‘credits’ or ‘certificates’ rely on step 1 and 2 being effectively implemented, which is especially important for buyers of credits who want to make any claims relating to nature positive.
COMBO+ and IMEC (a thematic group on impact mitigation and ecological compensation of IUCN's Commission on Ecosystem Management) will continue promoting policy and best practice on the mitigation hierarchy to achieve goals such as no net loss, net gain and nature positive.