Sorry, this is very long but it's a complex subject and if we allow 'biodiversity' to be bought and sold like cornflakes in 200 years most sites will have a poor biodiversity.
Most habitats require certain baseline conditions based on physical parameters and processes e.g. soil chemistry, hydrology, climate, altitude, size etc. This means that only certain sites are able to produce the ecological processes which makes a site sustainable for a particular habitat or species. Further, different sites will always try and produce a climax community based on these conditions and ‘swapping’ sites around based on economic value of the land rather than on its suitability for a specific habitat is a recipe for disaster. Even small changes which seem trivial to us can change the competition balance between species and therefore the ultimate ecological community that develops.
There is also the problem with management. Most habitats in this country are semi-natural, developed since the last ice age based on our management practices. Management on all but a few sites e.g. nature reserves, must be economically sustainable or they won’t work. I’ve been in the conservation business for long enough to know that sustainable management is harder to organise than finding appropriate sites.
The scheme could work for easily re-creatable habitats which have a low biodiversity, are based on pioneer species or is aimed at a specific species e.g. feeding areas for farmland birds and brownfield sites e.g. for black redstart . However, even single species which have easy habitat requirements e.g.
Water Voles require a network of meta populations to be viable. It would be difficult to acquire a site which was both suitable, had viable satellite populations and the linking networks on the open market. Constantly buying and selling sites in quick succession would soon destroy most habitat complexity and the ecological interactions that sustain them.
The only other way this could work is for areas which are naturally dynamic and move if given the space to do so e.g. saltmarsh and mudflats. Coastal squeeze is presently the greatest danger to these habitats. As the sea level rises but the sea defences stay in the same place the habitat is destroyed as the natural movement of the saltmarsh is halted by the sea defences. In some cases this can be solved by habitat banking i.e. buy the farmland behind the saltmarsh and breach the sea defences. These projects already exist and will be more common however, they are done either for ecological reasons or to reduce spending on flood defences i.e. they have no intrinsic economic value to developers and would not be suitable for the open market.
There are other flaws as well to do with what proportion of which habitats do we want to save. If all you want to do is make SPAs, SACs and SSSIs a commodity to be bought and sold that’s easy to regulate although it’s bound to end in long term and continual degradation of the sites as longevity = complexity and if there’s one thing the market hates it’s longevity. But how about river corridors which only have mediocre conservation value? how much of that do we save and if you sell one bit how can it be replaced as the new corridor would go somewhere else so what happens to the habitats you’ve cut off from the network?
We already have a planning system which is supposed to provide all of the above anyway which is far from perfect but is based on regulation rather than the open market (see PPS9 which is the governments guidance to planners on how to deal with biodiversity and development
http://www.communities.gov.uk/docume...ing/pdf/147408). By putting this onto the open market it’s saying that the market is what’s important and everything is for sale, even if it’s a finite resource which you can’t guarantee to replacement because you don’t know how it works i.e. all the physical and biological complexities which make up a biologically rich site. I’d rather say that some things aren’t for sale like our biological heritage as a) it’s is not a commodity but a necessity and b) we don’t know how to replace it anyway as it’s so complex.
Chris
Linear Mode
