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 Michelle Gane
Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, Research Portfolio
Thesis Title: To examine the principles, opportunities and challenges of environmental banking in Queensland by way of practical, technical guidelines based on case studies.
Current Thesis Abstract: Now used in many other parts of the world, the terms environmental offsets, mitigation banks, no-net-loss, environmental stewardships, conservation habitat banking, BioBanks and environmental banking all describe efforts to ensure that significant and unavoidable adverse environmental impacts are counterbalanced by a positive (net) environmental gain. Compensatory wetland mitigation credits, for example, have been recognised in North America as an appropriate way to compensate for adverse impacts caused by increased development pressures on wetlands.
Mitigation banking has been endorsed by organisations such as the Society of Wetland Scientists because of its contribution towards no net loss of wetlands. An environmental bank has been defined as an area managed for its natural resources values in business terms. It can be an assortment of properties or a single, large parcel of land. Within the bank, habitats are restored, created, enhanced or preserved for the purpose of providing compensation for unavoidable impacts elsewhere ( i.e. offsetting).
Private sector involvement in conservation is a growing activity around the world, and is generating increasing interest at the same time as public funding for conservation is declining. Private investors or land owners can ‘develop' land for the purpose of making environmental banks, and then sell ‘credits' on the open market to customers who need to compensate for the loss of characteristic natural resource elsewhere. It is rapidly becoming accepted as a vital tool in the conservation of our natural resources. Early manifestations of technical interest in the subject in Australia are taking the form of government calls for studies of market-based instruments for environmental conservation and carbon sequestration planning (‘tree banks”).
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