|
Own a pond and you will be able to 'sell' environmental credits for it to someone else who wants to build on their land. The CLA has joined calls for a 'green stock exchange' where credits can be traded.
A landowner or farmer creates a pond on his land increasing habitats for wildlife and plants. As part of the planning process the project would be awarded a number of environmental credits which the landowner can either hold, or sell into the environmental market. Meanwhile, a farmer in another part of the UK wants to build some affordable housing. This development will affect the environment, and the planning system insists he offsets this damage by buying a specified number of credits from the environmental market. By this means, managed development in rural communities can go ahead and land managers are encouraged to The CLA says that the state of the environment and rural development could be both boosted by an exchange where environmental credits are traded. The scheme was unveiled at a launch of the CLA paper Private Solutions To Public Problems: Developing Environmental Markets at a CLA seminar at the offices of Smith & Williamson in the City of London. CLA President Henry Aubrey-Fletcher says: "The CLA is proposing a revolutionary way of using private markets to provide the environmental protection and maintenance that society increasingly demands. "In the paper that the CLA launched at the seminar, we describe a wide range of different mechanisms by which this could be achieved. We are calling for the Government to convene a Biodiversity Business Partnership to develop and create environmental markets in the UK." Former CLA chief economist and the author of the report Dr Derrick Wilkinson says: "We know this could work in the UK. In Australia, bio-banking has been shown to work to address the loss of biodiversity, and in the US there are no fewer than 122 mitigation banks and a market worth a billion dollars. "Creating these environmental markets would be a triple victory – a win for the environment, a win for rural business and also a win for environmental regulators who would find themselves working with fewer but more professional environmental producers." |
Weather & climate change 
