Habitat banking at a standstill

In many countries worldwide, development projects are asked to comply with the “mitigation hierarchy” in environmental impact assessment. They must avoid environmental impacts as much as possible in the project design phase, minimize unavoidable impacts through specific measures during implementation, address impacts on-site through specific remediation and restoration environmental activities, and finally offset the residual environmental impacts of the project that cannot be mitigated either near the affected habitats or further afield. The latter are…

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Regrow forests with people

In a Letter led by Rose Pritchard and Dan Brockington (University of Sheffield), published in Nature last Thursday, we respond to a recent Commentary in the same journal by Lewis et al. The authors advocate for increasing carbon sequestration uptake through forest restoration, in order to mitigate climate change. Lewis et al. call to do so promoting the growth and protection of ‘natural forests’, particularly in tropical and sub-tropical countries, and avoiding the use of…

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