Environmental Offsets
Biodiversity offsets have increasingly been used as measures to compensate for residual environmental impacts that cannot be adequately reduced through impact avoidance or mitigation. They can help to achieve long-term conservation outcomes for threatened species and ecological communities, increase connectivity across the landscape, build ecosystem resilience to climate change and protect essential ecosystem services, while provide flexibility for proponents seeking to undertake an action that will have unavoidable environmental impacts.
We are an accredited Company under the Victorian BushBroker scheme, where we work closely with our clients in securing suitable offset sites to meet their requirements under the State Government's
Native Vegetation Management - A Framework for Action (Net Gain policy). Very few organisations are accredited and our clients benefit from our extensive experience in the process (having worked on over 50 offset projects), our local knowledge, and established contacts and relationships in this area. This enables us to identify suitable sites, rapidly secure them to comply with approval conditions, and to manage sites on behalf of our clients.
We also assist our clients in the identification of suitable offsets sites in other States, and sites that support Matters of National Environmental Significance under the Commonwealth
Environment, Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 to satisfy approval conditions under the Act
.
With the growing emphasis on carbon reduction in Australia, and the introduction of the
Carbon Farming Initiative (a carbon offset scheme), we are currently assisting clients with the development and implementation of project methodologies (e.g. sequestration through reforestation and revegetation, savanna fire management) to generate carbon credits that can be sold to other businesses wanting to offset their carbon emissions.