Offsetting

Offsetting in relation to the environment involves undertaking additional environmentally beneficial activity in order to compensate for known environmental damage elsewhere. The aim is to achieve ‘no net loss’ of environmental assets, so offsetting is about counteracting or neutralising environmental harm – for example caused by a new road or housing development. Offsetting is therefore conditional on being able to calculate the amount of environmental harm that has been done, as well as the benefit (in order that remedial activity can be undertaken). For this reason much of the day-today practice of offsetting has centred on valuation and measurement. A fundamental belief underpinning environmental offsetting is that different environmental activities are commensurable, i.e. that they can be made to be the same or equivalent.