39: Biodiversity Enhancement (BNG) in Ireland with Liz O’Reilly, Malcolm Noonan and Hannah Sheridan

Yes, well, to kick us off, Jason, I know you're working on a paper that sets out science principles for biodiversity enhancement approaches across the UK and Ireland.

Could you tell us some more about these principles and how they apply whatever they approach to biodiversity enhancement?

Yeah, thanks.

I think that's a nice overarching introduction to this episode.

So we've been working for some time, we'll be honest, on a paper that's a sort of overarching approaches to biodiversity enhancements across all of the four nations of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

Every time we've updated it, something's happened.

So the constant policy changes.

So at some point, we need to just put our foot down and go, right, this is the snapshot.

So it's looking at the different approaches across each of the countries.

So how biodiversity net gain obviously started in England, is mandated in England, and how different approaches are being developed in each of the other countries.

In particular, though, the driver for this position paper really was a few comments and criticisms in some ways, actually, that SIAM has received over the past couple of years in how we've been dealing with BNG, but also the other approaches.

So one of those is our support or otherwise for a metric and a criticism of how we're supporting a metric approach in England and then say a qualitative approach in Wales with net benefits for biodiversity.

And our response to that is to say that actually we are more interested in the outcome and what we want is an outcome of nature recovery And we need to look at the metric as a tool to achieve that.

And it's not necessary that you have to use that in every circumstance.

It is useful, but it's not mandatory or not required in every circumstance.

And the other one that we keep coming up against is there are lots of tensions and lots of very passionate views on offsite versus onsite.

And whether we should just put all of our eggs into one basket, probably in particular the offsite, as that will be great for nature.

But I think we have to recognize that there are benefits to on-site as well.

They differ in that on-site we're probably getting more benefits for people and their connectedness to nature and the benefits that nature bring in an urban environment, for example, but also wider connectivity.

But what we do off-site, we can obviously do much bigger and better and much more in terms of benefits for nature itself and biodiversity and those kind of things.

But we have to have both.

We can't do one or the other.

So it's just laying out some of those things, explaining our position on some of those things, and putting that in a paper along with a snapshot of what's going on in each of the countries.