To guarantee that offsets meaningfully contribute to biodiversity conservation and an absolute gain in habitat, and to avoid being used to justify projects that are otherwise environmentally unacceptable - environmental offsets must be strictly limited, infrequently used, and governed by stringent criteria for their selection, use, monitoring and reporting. This should include:
- ensuring that WA’s existing policy and guidelines, which call for avoidance and mitigation of environmental destruction being exhausted before environmental offsets are considered, are properly enforced with transparency and accountability measures in place;
- amending the EP Act to include the mitigation hierarchy for decision making*
- implementing clear conditions for environmental offsets to measure ecological outcomes, which include contingency and future planning, in the event of ecological outcomes not being met;
- implementing mandatory monitoring and reporting that is timely and with severe penalties to incentivise compliance; and
- subjecting biodiversity offset sites to legal mechanisms (e.g. conservation covenants) to ensure these sites are conserved in perpetuity
*The Environmental Protection Act 2019 (NT) s26 has an environmental decision-making hierarchy which requires decision makers, proponents and approval holders to apply the hierarchy in order of priority.