Thesis Title:
Market-Based Conservation and Environmental Justice: The Case of Biodiversity Offsetting in the UK
Thesis Abstract:
The accelerating biodiversity crisis has intensified pressure on policymakers to develop effective conservation strategies. Market-based approaches, particularly biodiversity offsetting, are increasingly promoted as key instruments for managing ecosystem services and mitigating biodiversity loss. Reflecting this global trend, the UK has also adopted biodiversity offsetting as a central policy instrument to integrate biodiversity considerations into development planning. However, the promise of ‘win-win’ outcomes often conceals a range of technical, social and ethical challenges. Offsetting policies risk generating an unequal distribution of environmental gains and burdens, raising pressing environmental and social justice issues.
On the one hand, these policies tend to standardize and over-simplify complex ecological relations, commodifying nature and applying economic metrics that alter the relationship between humans and non-human nature. On the other hand, the financial logic embedded in these approaches reconfigures biodiversity governance through the pricing of nature in ways that may reinforce spatial, social and environmental inequalities. This research therefore positions biodiversity justice as an extension of environmental justice concerns, examining the evolution of UK biodiversity offsetting policy, highlighting the unequal distribution of biodiversity impacts and critically assessing the role of biodiversity finance in shaping justice outcomes.
Primary Supervisor:
Dr Evangelia Apostolopoulou