Abstract
The development and private sectors are increasingly considering “biodiversity offsets” as a strategy to compensate for their negative impacts on biodiversity, including impacts on great apes and their habitats in Africa. In the absence of national offset policies in sub-Saharan Africa, offset design and implementation are guided by company internal standards, lending bank standards or international best practice principles. We examine four projects in Africa that are seeking to compensate for their negative impacts on great ape populations. Our assessment of these projects reveals that not all apply or implement best practices, and that there is little standardization in the methods used to measure losses and gains in species numbers. Even if they were to follow currently accepted best-practice principles, we find that these actions may still fail to contribute to conservation objectives over the long term. We advocate for an alternative approach in which biodiversity offset and compensation projects are designed and implemented as part of a National Offset Strategy that (1) takes into account the cumulative impacts of development in individual countries, (2) identifies priority offset sites, (3) promotes aggregated offsets, and (4) integrates biodiversity offset and compensation projects with national biodiversity conservation objectives. We also propose supplementary principles necessary for biodiversity offsets to contribute to great ape conservation in Africa. Caution should still be exercised, however, with regard to offsets until further field-based evidence of their effectiveness is available.
Highlights
Great apes–gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos–are distributed across 21 countries on the African continent [1]
This paper focuses on great apes, we believe the results of this study will apply to many other EN and Critically Endangered (CR) taxa
Despite the vulnerability of apes to disturbances, the long time it takes ape populations to recover from disturbances, their EN and CR status, and the ethical questions surrounding offsetting apes, all four projects assumed that great apes and their habitats could be at least compensated if not totally offset to achieve a no net loss
Summary
Great apes–gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos–are distributed across 21 countries on the African continent [1]. Two of the projects we examined based additionality on ‘‘averted loss’’ by updating the protected status of an area; the Loma Mountains National Park in Sierra Leone for BHP, and the Deng Deng National Park in Cameroon for the Lom Pangar Dam, and in the case of Lom Pangar extending areas for conservation around the park to protect great ape habitat Both GAP and the Simandou project have provided a short list of potential offsets sites, indicating that their offsets will consider ‘‘averted loss’’ as the counterbalance to actual loss on site. Studies conducted in the Loma Mountains and Deng Deng forests determined both these areas to be important for apes and biodiversity in general These biodiversity offset and compensation sites appear to be located in national priority sites for these species and seem to be complying with this best practice principle. No information is currently available on how the GAP or Simandou offsets will be funded
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