Balancing forest area preservation and biodiversity offsets in the forest: Forest owners’ policy preferences

In many densely populated countries in Europe, land suitable for agriculture, forest and protected areas is becoming scarcer with expanding settlement area. One way to mitigate this pressure is to abstain from the in-kind replacement of forest clearances and to allow for their compensation by nature conservation projects on areas other than agricultural land, including the forest itself. It is particularly the latter that implies a difficult trade-off for forest owners who adhere to the forest area preservation principle but at the same time support biodiversity offsetting in the forest as a potential new source of income. This paper analyses the stated preferences of forest owners in the Swiss canton of Berne with a discrete choice survey experiment that allows examining how forest owners reconcile this trade-off and whether the requirement to spatially coordinate offsets affects their willingness to participate in such a scheme. The results show that while biodiversity offsetting in the forest is disputed and support is generally low, those forest owners that participate do not exclusively offer low-effectivity measures on marginal forest land. However, they also demand substantial financial compensation. A spatial coordination of biodiversity offsets is certainly not their main concern and thus needs to be secured by respective regulation. • We conduct a choice experiment among forest owners about biodiversity offsetting in the forest. • Biodiversity offsetting should compensate forest plots that were converted to other land-use. • A large proportion of invited forest owners rejects biodiversity offsets in lieu of compensatory afforestation. • A majority of those completing the choice experiment is offering offsets on productive forest plots. • This group is indifferent towards spatial coordination, which thus needs to be provided by the state.