13.3.2.0 Introductie

The mechanisms that have been developed to cope with environmental liabilities ultimately serve the purpose of avoiding damage to nature. Environmental mitigation is a new concept that is currently on the rise. An innovative approach is to work with ' nature credits' . These are meant to compensate (future) damage to nature caused by economic activities and aim at creating a ' no net loss' of nature situation. Such credits can be traded in a manner similar to the carbon emission credits. Nature credit frameworks include wetland banking, habitat banking and biodiversity offsets. 'Habitat' refers to the environment or the place where an organism or biological population normally live. The US-based non-profit organisation Forests Trends researched existing compensatory mitigation programmes around the world and found 39 in 2010. They range from programmes with active mitigation banking of biodiversity credits to programs channelling development impact fees to policies that drive one-off offsets. Another 25 programmes appeared to be in various stages of development or investigation. Within each active offset program, numerous individual offset sites have been identified, including over 600 mitigation banks worldwide. The global annual market size is estimated between USD 1.8 and USD 2.9 billion at minimum, and is likely much more, as 80 per cent of the existing programmes appeared not to be transparent enough to estimate their market size. The conservation impact of this market includes at least 86,000 hectares of land under some sort of conservation management or permanent legal protection per year. To illustrate this business model of nature conservation, the approaches of wetland banking and biodiversity offsets will be discussed in the following sections.1