The consequences of coastal offsets for fisheries

Biodiversity offsetting is increasingly used to mitigate biodiversity impacts from development, but the practice of offsetting rarely considers how to also mitigate losses of ecosystem services. Offset rules, such as how near an offset must be to an impact site, may help ensure biodiversity offsets also counterbalance losses of ecosystem services but this has not yet well understood.
We explored how different rules for siting coastal offsets could change net impacts to a provisioning ecosystem service: fishery resources in Queensland, Australia. A spatially-explicit model incorporating supply, flow and demand of fishery resources was developed to simulate contributions of offset sites to commercial fisheries in Queensland, Australia. We simulated offsets for losses due to 63 real projects that damaged mangroves and 14 projects damaging seagrasses.
We found that the percentage of species suffering net negative outcomes for the whole commercial fishery increased from about 68% wh...