INFRASTRUCTURE
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“Many developers will need to pay to offset their impact on biodiversity” Jon Davies, RSK Wilding
REWILD THING: BUILDING BIODIVERSITY ‘NET GAIN’ NEW ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATION MEANS MANY PROJECTS WILL HAVE TO DELIVER A 10% BIODIVERSITY NET GAIN – LIKELY ENCOURAGING AN INCREASE IN ‘COMMERCIAL REWILDING’. CM REPORTS The new Environment Bill became law on 31 December and will oblige many construction projects to deliver a 10% ‘biodiversity net gain’. It is a significant leap forward from the current situation, where developers only have to ‘mitigate’ the impact of their projects. This will affect any landowner seeking planning consent under the Town & Country Planning Act, for
new build or refurbishment. In some cases, developers will be able to achieve the 10% biodiversity net gain on site. However, most projects will struggle to achieve this, believes Jon Davies, head of environmental consultant RSK Wilding. “In practice many developers will need to pay to offset their impact on biodiversity,” he says.
“One option is a reforestation or wetland creation elsewhere in the world. However, the biodiversity metric used by the Department of Environment, Fishing and Agriculture (DEFRA) values offsetting less the further it is from the source of the impact. That’s partly to encourage UK biodiversity improvement following the prime minister’s September commitment to ensure that 30% of land is protected for nature by 2030. “Local biodiversity offsetting replaces a habitat with a new one nearby. These high-intervention approaches can require significant upfront capital costs, and it is not always easy to recreate specific habitats.” A less familiar, but more costeffective and natural approach is commercial rewilding, argues Davies. “It’s a term often associated with reintroduction of animals like beavers and even wolves but is more commonly a ‘ground-up’ approach, creating the conditions for the land to regenerate itself naturally and be recolonised by insects and plants,” he explains. Achieving biodiversity net gain through commercial rewilding requires firstly, identification of ecologically degraded land local to the construction project, then employing ecologists and other environmental and land management specialists to design a rewilding strategy for the site that suits its specific conditions. “The ecologists will advise on the number of biodiversity units – the
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