You’ve heard of offsetting carbon. Well how about offsetting dead seabirds?
Many seabird populations are threatened because the birds end up as by-catch in commercial fishing nets. If restricting fishing fails, the last resort is usually to close fisheries. Now two ecologists claim that a better way may be “biodiversity offsetting” – placing a levy on by-catch and using the money to pay for alternative conservation efforts.
Chris Wilcox of Australian national research organisation CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania, and Josh Donlan of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, tested the approach by modelling a population of flesh-footed shearwater (Puffinus carneipes)…
