Establish, use and management of habitat banks in practice

Purpose and goal

The overall aim for the project has been to develop an initial draft of a habitat banking system in Sweden. Key questions that need to be addressed has been analyzed, stakeholders that should be involved have been identified and with the results of the project it is possible to start design a habitat bank in practice. Experiences from the project indicate that there is a curiosity and an interest to try an offset scheme in Sweden even though there are several challenges to address.

Results and expected effects

Prerequisites for a wide-scale implementation of a banking system in Sweden that could meet developers with legal requirements for biodiversity offsetting are not in place today mainly due to lack of common regulatory guidelines. There is no guarantees that credits created in a habitat bank are accepted by regulatory authorities as ecological compensation which prevents investments. However, it would be possible to use the results from the project and develop a habitat bank for voluntary compensation for buyers that are interested to invest in natural capital on a voluntary basis.

Approach and implementation

Initially, established banking systems in Australia, USA and Germany were studied in order to identify key questions that need to be addressed in a habitat banking system and possible solutions for these key questions in a Swedish context. The project also conducted a web based survey among different stakeholders in order to get an insight in the general interest for habitat banking schemes in Sweden.