Challenges of achieving biodiversity offset outcomes through agri-environmental schemes: evidence from an empirical study in Southern France »

Coralie Calvet, Philippe Le Coent, Claude Napoleone and Fabien Quetier

Working Papers from LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier

Abstract: Environmental policies increasingly refer to biodiversity offsets (BO) as a way to slow or halt biodiversity losses caused by development projects, including infrastructure and urban development, that could not be avoided or minimized through adequate mitigation. In many cases, ecological gains for offsets are obtained through restoration activities conducted on ecologically degraded land, including agricultural land specifically acquired for this purpose by developers. This leads to competition with other land-uses and social conflicts over land availability. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the opportunity of implementing biodiversity offsets by involving farmers in producing ecological gains through contracts akin to agri-environmental schemes, we call Agri-environmental Biodiversity Offsets Schemes (ABOS). Using actual offsets designed and implemented for a new railway line under construction in Southern France, this paper examines (1) the acceptability of ABOS contracts by farmers, and (2) the effectiveness of ABOS design and actual implementation. A survey carried out with 145 farmers reveals that the main determinants of acceptability are: i) usual economic factors whereby farmers with lowest compliance levels and opportunity costs, as well as farms facing economic difficulty, are more likely to engage, and ii) social factors, such as the importance given to other farmers’ decision to engage and the perception of the position of farming organisations (peer pressure). In terms of effectiveness, ABOS is shown to be effective in meeting the legal requirements of the developer, but concerns are raised about additionality and long-term duration of actions, and about non-compliance with contract requirements. We particularly highlight problems with contract enforcement – especially due to weak sanctions and monitoring – and farmers’ selection that do not allow minimizing moral hazard and adverse selection which are inherently attached to agrienvironmental schemes. We suggest policy improvements and research perspectives to enhance the implementation of offsets through ABOS. Overall, with current implementation arrangements, this analysis leads us to question the use of ABOS in meeting BO objectives

Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lameta.univ-montp1.fr/Documents/DR2017-05.pdf First version, 06-2017 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.lameta.univ-montp1.fr:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Challenges of achieving biodiversity offset outcomes through agri-environmental schemes: Evidence from an empirical study in Southern France (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lam:wpaper:17-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patricia Modat ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).