Some offset schemes allow research or public education as “indirect” offsets, as opposed to a direct offset, which undertakes on-ground works that create environmental benefits in a clear and direct way. Is this a sound approach?

Let’s look at the Australian Government’s offset scheme as an example. It defines indirect offsets as “activities that do not directly offset the impacts on the protected matter like direct offsets but are designed to deliver benefits for the impacted protected matter through other means. This might include funding for research to support better decision making and management.”

It has a set of guidelines around indirect offsets that, at face value, make sense. A suitable research or education program must:

• be no more than 10% of the required offset
• provide an overall benefit to the protected matter
• be targeted toward key research or education activities identified in relevant Commonwealth-approved documents
• be undertaken in a scientific manner and within a reasonable time frame, using up-to-date research methods by suitably qualified researchers

In the Australian Government scheme, indirect offsets are used as a gap filler. If a proposed offset project isn’t quite beneficial enough to counter a set of development impacts, the proponent can make up the difference with an indirect offset. I imagine that this streamlines the development-approval process.

The big challenge for an offset scheme that allows indirect offsets is being confident about the second dot point – the delivery of actual tangible benefits. What is needed to achieve that? I’ll mainly talk about research, but I’ll make some comments later about public education.

A team of us published a paper in 2018 called “Policy-oriented environmental research: What is it worth?” (Pannell et al. 2018). One of the points we make in the paper is that the link between environmental research and benefits is complex and potentially fragile. For example, the research may or may not be successful in delivering the desired information. Even if it is successful, it may or may not influence policy decisions. Even if it does influence policy decisions, the quality and success of policy implementation will lie somewhere on the spectrum from poor to good. If the policy relies on behaviour change, the degree of behaviour change achieved by policies is often less than desired. Even if behaviour-change targets are achieved, there is uncertainty about how large the environmental benefits will be. If any of the links in that chain fails, the research fails to deliver its hoped-for benefits.

Clearly, some research on ecology or conservation has a huge impact on conservation outcomes, but it’s hardly surprising that a lot doesn’t.

Given all that, I think that an offset scheme should be highly systematic and rigorous and somewhat conservative when considering whether to accept a research project as part of an offset. It could be subjected to a checklist of probing questions, perhaps including:

1. What is the probability that the research will deliver the information it seeks?
2. Who would use that information? Have they agreed that they would use it? How likely are they to use it in practice? Can the decision processes or the management processes in their organisation accommodate information of that type?
3. Which particular decision(s) or actions would it influence? How likely is it that new research results would change current decisions or actions?
4. Do the benefits of a changed decision or action depend on behaviour change? If so, how much behaviour change can realistically be expected?

A good strategy for an offset program could be to say that they don’t accept research on its own as an indirect offset, but they may accept research as part of an integrated offset project that utilises research to inform its decisions and on-ground actions. That way, there could be relatively high confidence that the usual challenges of delivering on-ground outcomes from research could be overcome.

With public education, I think the challenges are even greater. Given that influencing behaviour through public education is really difficult and often unsuccessful, I would want to be extremely conservative in evaluating whether a particular education project could be acceptable as an offset. A similarly probing set of questions would need to be asked and answered convincingly. Again, it would be best if it was part of an integrated offset project including well-designed on-ground management actions (and maybe research). The contributions of education and research would be included within the overall contributions of the project.

Further reading

Pannell, D.J., Alston, J.M., Jeffrey, S., Buckley, Y.M., Vesk, P., Rhode, J.R., McDonald-Madden, E., Nally, S., Gouche, G. and Thamo, T. (2018). Policy-oriented environmental research: What is it worth? Environmental Science and Policy 86, 64-71.