Evaluation of the effectiveness of Biodiversity Offsetting scheme in North-Brabant

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges that our society faces today and the current loss of biodiversity caused by human actions is referred to as the 6th great extinction. Biodiversity extinction has many drivers, but land use for agriculture and the development of settlements and infrastructure is the most significant (Newbold et al.2015, Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020).

One policy response to halt biodiversity loss is the so-called no-net-loss policy, which is usually combined with the mitigation hierarchy. The mitigation hierarchy states that impacts to biodiversity should be avoided, reduced, and only the unavoidable impact should be offset.

The most relevant protection policy in the EU and also in the Netherlands is the 1979 Birds Directive and the 1992 Habitats Directive based on which Natura 2000 sites are determined. The legislation entails the mitigation hierarchy and a compensation aspect to it, which is also implemented in the Netherlands (Beleidsregel natuurcompensatie, 1998). Therefore, the development of protected ecosystems has to be offset by recreating an ecosystem of similar quality in close proximity to the developed site. Evaluation of no‑net‑loss and compensation measures in biodiversity offsetting is rare, especially post-implementation and across different countries (zu Ermgassen et al. 2019). This is also related to a lack of data transparency (Bull et al. 2018). The implementation foresaw that every Dutch province is responsible for the implementation of a no‑net‑loss policy itself, therefore also the province of North‑Brabant has its own implementation. North-Brabant is the region with the best documentation of developed and compensated sites in the Netherlands (Province North‑Brabant, 2023). In this thesis, you will evaluate if the compensation sites in North-Brabant result in no-net-loss of forest cover and the forest cover diversity, when compared to the destroyed sites.