Abstract
Scientific research on the mitigation hierarchy has steadily increased over the past few years at the international level. While some seek to improve the application of this public action instrument, others point out its shortcomings and risks. This opinion paper—which focuses on the French context—does not provide an exhaustive overview of existing research but instead targets specific issues considered to be a “priority”. We mainly investigate the relevance and implementation of the mitigation hierarchy, especially from an ecological point of view. Part of this paper thus questions the very principle of biodiversity offsetting (BO)—the last resort of the mitigation hierarchy that brings together numerous controversies—and the adequacy of the mitigation hierarchy with the objective of no net loss (NNL) of biodiversity. The general idea underlying this paper is to show how the mitigation hierarchy has been built and based on what values (mainly economic and legal, which leads us to conclude about the lack of ecology in the policy itself). In doing so, we provide a few perspectives as to what should be done to (better) integrate ecology into land use planning and development.
Highlights
Introduction and Daniele TorreggianiOfficially, the mitigation hierarchy—which aims to “avoid, minimize, compensate” for the environmental impacts of land use planning—dates back to the 1970s
The mitigation hierarchy is applied in the environmental impact assessments (EIAs), which inventories, describes, and assesses all adverse impacts on the environment caused by projects, plans, and programs
We propose to address two challenges that tend to go beyond the mitigation hierarchy framework: The first challenge requires looking at temporal issues, including the consideration of ecological temporalities; the second challenge involves questioning the ethical values that shape our relationship with nature
Summary
The mitigation hierarchy—which aims to “avoid, minimize, compensate” for the environmental impacts of land use planning (i.e., projects, plans, and programs)—dates back to the 1970s. Since it has been introduced and regulated by law in many countries and applied through various environmental policies. The hierarchy aims to avoid as much as possible the environmental impacts of projects, plans, and programs (including those that affect biodiversity), to reduce any unavoidable adverse impacts, and eventually, after all efforts have been made to avoid and reduce, to use biodiversity offsetting (BO).
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