The Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP) grew to be an international collaboration in which more than 130 leading organizations and individuals including companies, financial institutions, government agencies and civil society organizations, were members of its Advisory Group from 2004-2018. Together, the members tested and developed best practice on biodiversity offsets and conservation banking worldwide.
The BBOP partners wish to show, through experience in a range of industry sectors, that careful mitigation, including biodiversity offsets, can help achieve significantly more, better and more cost-effective conservation outcomes than normally occurs in infrastructure development. The BBOP partners believe that demonstrating no net loss of biodiversity (and preferably a net gain) can help companies secure their license to operate, better manage their costs and liabilities, and improve outcomes for affected communities.
BBOP’s goals:
- To provide a global forum for collective learning, the dissemination of biodiversity mitigation and offset concepts and the sharing of experience on implementation.
- To assist developers in designing and implementing mitigation measures including offsets that produce measurable and long term conservation outcomes in the widest range of countries and sectors possible.
- To support the development of institutional, legal and regulatory frameworks which support no net loss and preferably a net gain of biodiversity, including biodiversity offsets.
- To improve biodiversity offset methods informed by practical experience and research and scientific practice.
- To promote development and adoption of biodiversity offset standards and methods for verification in the domain of the mitigation hierarchy, no net loss and biodiversity net gain, such as the Standard on Biodiversity Offsets, with a view to ensuring that mitigation measures including offsets are applied when appropriate and to a high standard.