Abstract
Biodiversity offset markets can incentivize private landowners to take actions that benefit biodiversity. A spatially explicit integrated ecological-economic model is developed and employed for a UK region where offset buyers (house developers) and sellers (farmers) interact through trading offset credits. We simulate how changes in the ecological metric and geographic scale affects the performance of the offset market. Results show that the choice of the metric has a significant effect on market liquidity and the spatial distribution of gains and losses in the “target” species. The results also consistently reveal relatively higher potential welfare gains for developers than for farmers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 836-857 |
Journal | Land Economics |
Volume | 97 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 8 Oct 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsWe thank The Leverhulme Trust for funding this work under project RPG-2017-148 and members of our advisory group for numerous helpful comments on the research.