Strengthening the mitigation hierarchy for greater conservation gains

The mitigation hierarchy is a widely advocated process of identifying, avoiding, minimizing and mitigating biodiversity impacts of development projects and is fast becoming best practice – promoted by banks such as the International Finance Corporation, companies such as Rio Tinto and cross-sector collaborative groups such as the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme. However, there is insufficient guidance on its appropriate use and there has been a tendency, in general, for the ‘avoidance’ and ‘minimisation’ steps to be overlooked and for greater emphasis to be placed on compensating or offsetting biodiversity impacts. Given the challenges associated with site restoration and the contentious nature of biodiversity offsetting, this trend represents both a material risk to businesses as well as a significant risk to biodiversity itself. ‘Biodiversity risk’ (i.e. the risk posed to businesses by the destruction/loss of biodiversity), although long recognised in certain industrial sectors (such as mining), is rapidly gaining traction in the wider corporate world, particularly the banking and finance sector. This project will aim to respond to and utilise this trend to identify and promote best practice examples for implementing the mitigation hierarchy, with a particular focus on avoidance and minimization. The outputs of this project will be used to highlight the critical importance and business value of avoiding and minimizing biodiversity impacts and to encourage companies to integrate these recommendations into their operations. The goals of the project include improving long-term biodiversity safeguards (in the form of a strengthened mitigation hierarchy developed through consensus), as well as to achieve measurable and additional conservation gains at the project level.