A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #370 - Ecology - Biodiversity: Ecological Compensation, a Scam (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In issue 369 of Alternative libertaire, we reviewed Alain Bihr's book, 
*Capitalist Ecocide*. Here, he exposes the scam of ecological 
compensation, particularly through the ERC principle: "avoid, reduce, 
compensate," a process that any new capitalist or state-run project 
should normally follow in terms of its potential ecological impact. 
Indeed, the third phase of compensation takes precedence over the other 
two, to the point of completely erasing them, even though we know that 
each destroyed site is unique, both geographically and in terms of 
biodiversity.

The idea of ecological compensation arose from the observation that the 
opening or expansion of agricultural or mining sites, industrial or 
commercial establishments, public facilities, housing, etc., can lead to 
a more or less significant degradation of a site's ecological quality, 
notably affecting biodiversity. Consequently, starting in the 1960s, 
regulations were adopted in a number of countries aimed at minimizing 
these negative impacts upstream of projects, reducing them as much as 
possible during project implementation (whereas it is not possible or 
desirable to avoid them altogether), and finally, compensating for any 
residual impacts in kind, according to the so-called ERC strategy: 
avoid, reduce, compensate.

A perverse implementation
Regarding biodiversity losses, compensation is based on the assumption 
that such a loss linked to the degradation or destruction of a site, 
here and now, can be compensated, elsewhere or at another time (sooner 
or later), in the form of the conservation or preservation of another 
site (the creation of nature reserves placed outside of any use), its 
improvement (by reducing or stopping the degradation it may suffer), its 
rehabilitation (by reintroducing species into biotopes from which they 
have disappeared) or even the restoration of a site if it has been more 
or less severely degraded or artificialized (by depolluting it, by 
allowing the reappearance of the native species that originally composed 
it), so as to generate gains in biodiversity deemed at least equivalent 
to the losses caused. The ultimate goal is to ensure overall 
"development without net loss of biodiversity" (GNP), or GDP growth 
without GNP...

With the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, 
deforestation in Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, 
Uruguay) could increase by 25% per year over the next six years.

Credit: Pok Rie
The implementation of ecological compensation has been the subject of 
much criticism. However, these criticisms fall into three different 
categories. The first set of criticisms primarily concerns the way in 
which the Avoid-Reduce-Compensate (ERC) approach is implemented. Often, 
the first two phases remain mere formalities under the pretext that 
there is always the possibility of ultimately compensating for the 
losses caused. Thus, from a last resort, compensation tends to become 
the first option.

The Elusive Metric
Furthermore, regardless of the clarity and rigor of the regulations in 
this area, compensation obligations are often circumvented or only 
minimally enforced by the very agents who are supposed to be responsible 
for them. And the penalties for violations remain far too lenient: in 
France, between 2013 and 2016, of the 22,000 environmental offenses 
recorded on average each year, more than 90% resulted in no prosecution 
or only a warning, only 6.7% in fines (of a rather paltry amount: 
between EUR1,000 and EUR5,000 on average), and only 0.1% in prison 
sentences[1].

A second set of criticisms more fundamentally challenges the 
aforementioned premise upon which the idea of compensating for 
biodiversity loss rests. Firstly, unlike emissions of various gases 
whose effects in terms of global warming can be attributed to those of 
carbon dioxide alone (according to conventions and assessments that are, 
moreover, debatable), it is impossible to define a common metric for 
biodiversity: a system of units of measurement allowing for the 
quantitative assessment of the ecological quality of different sites, so 
that they can be compared to one another. More precisely, it is 
impossible to agree on what should be measured (the various aspects of 
each site's ecological richness) and how to measure it. The proof lies 
in the hundreds of different assessment methods that exist worldwide.

In *Capitalist Ecocide*, Alain Bihr observes: "Between 1890 and 1990, 
while the world population quadrupled, global GDP increased 
fourteenfold, industrial production fortyfold, energy consumption 
thirteenfold, water consumption ninefold, CO2 emissions seventeenfold, 
and SO2 (sulfur oxide) emissions thirteenfold, etc."

Credit: Chris LeBoutillier
Secondly, this inability to develop a common metric stems from the 
current limitations of our understanding of the complexity of 
interactions between species and between species and their habitats, 
which constitute and ensure biodiversity within an ecosystem: "We 
currently lack sufficiently developed techniques and concepts to claim a 
comprehensive understanding of the consequences of a project on 
biodiversity and its dynamics"[2]. The gaps in our current knowledge of 
biodiversity also hinder our ability to predict the ecological evolution 
of environments affected by compensation practices, especially since 
this evolution can extend over centuries (for example, in the case of 
forests, peat bogs, etc.).

Finally, and thirdly, the ecological quality of a site most often 
depends closely on its location, in other words, its relationship with 
surrounding sites. This relationship is disregarded, in principle, by 
establishing a biodiversity market, which considers it possible to 
declare equivalent sites located in profoundly different socio-natural 
environments because they are radically unique. This highlights the 
contradiction between, on the one hand, the qualitative diversity of 
ecological wealth, which ultimately makes sites irreplaceable-a 
diversity linked to the irreducible originality of each site, a unique 
characteristic shaped by the social practices (material, institutional, 
and symbolic) that have contributed to their creation-and, on the other 
hand, the quantitative homogeneity to which we seek to reduce them in 
order to integrate them into market relations, to exchange them by 
declaring them commensurable and interchangeable. This contradiction is 
ultimately none other than that between use value and exchange value.

Sacrificing Lady with an Ermine to save the Mona Lisa?
This also reveals the fallacious nature of the presupposition upon which 
biodiversity loss compensation markets are based: the existence of 
fragments of nature deemed interchangeable because their ecological use 
values (often reduced to the multiple ecosystem services they provide) 
are considered equivalent. This assumption ignores the radical 
originality of a site or ecosystem, which implies that its degradation 
or destruction always constitutes a net and irreplaceable loss, 
regardless of any preservation, conservation, restoration, or even 
creation of similar sites or ecosystems elsewhere.

Therefore, it is but a short step to question, even more radically, the 
very principle of ecological compensation-the third type of criticism. 
To want to assign a price to an element of nature, as is ultimately the 
case in ecological compensation schemes, is to want to equate a 
non-reproducible natural element (a living species, a wild natural 
environment, an ecosystem) with a quantum of value, and thus of abstract 
human labor, utterly incapable of reproducing it, thereby denying its 
very essence: its uniqueness. In fact, nothing can "compensate" for the 
destruction of such an element, which constitutes a radical loss, not 
even the preservation of another similar element. To claim otherwise 
would be to assert that one could sacrifice a work by Leonardo da Vinci 
(or any other painter or artist more generally), for example Lady with 
an Ermine, on the condition of preserving or restoring another of his 
works, for example the Mona Lisa, without the pictorial (or more 
broadly, artistic) heritage of humanity being impoverished as a result. 
And the same argument can be repeated regarding any other element of 
humanity's heritage, of which the ecosystems we have inherited are an 
integral part. This leads to denouncing the futility of these policies, 
which some theorists and practitioners of ecological compensation 
eventually concede: "Compensating precisely for the entirety and 
specificities of each impacted site is illusory, because each impacted 
site is unique, particularly due to its geographical location, its 
historical trajectory, and its uses"[3].

A futility compounded by cynicism, since it ultimately cloaks the 
impoverishment of biodiversity in the virtues of its conservation and 
masks the devastation of nature under the guise of its preservation.

Alain Bihr

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[1]Harold Levrel, Ecological Compensation, Paris, La Découverte, 2020.

[2]Fabien Quétier et al., "The Stakes of Ecological Equivalence for the 
Design and Sizing of Compensatory Measures for Impacts on Biodiversity 
and Natural Environments," INRAE, Sciences Eaux & Territoires, Special 
Issue No. 7, 2012.

[3]Ibid.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Biodiversite-Compensation-ecologique-une-escroquerie
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