Le diable dans les détails : les défis de la régulation des marchés d’unités de biodiversité. L’exemple du conservation banking dans le cadre de l’ Endangered Species Act (États-Unis)

Widely used in the United States as a mean to offset damage caused to biodiversity, habitat banking aims, on the one hand, to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of compensatory measures imposed to developers and, on the other hand, to provide more flexibility for spatial development. This mechanism allows developers whose projects will cause damage to biodiversity to meet their mitigation obligations through the purchase of credits representing the (advanced) implementation of beneficial actions for biodiversity by specialized land managers, in proportion to the damage caused. Beyond the controversial debate on the ?market? nature of habitat banking, the question remains whether this tool is able to meet its primary objective, i.e. achieving no net biodiversity loss. This study analyses the role of regulation in framing the factors which are critical to the ecological performance of habitat banking, taking the example of the ?Conservation Banking? scheme (USA). We examined the challenges US administration is facing to ensure the effectiveness of habitat banking in protecting species under the Endangered Species Act. It appears from the study that such task is complex, as there are many ecological conditions to be met to ensure no net loss while ecological restoration techniques are still in development. The analysis confirms the importance of a close supervision of such ?markets? through clear and precise regulation and the need for the intervention of an independant regulatory authority with sufficient enforcement power. Far from the traditional image of the market, habitat banking needs, to be both effective and efficient, a massive public intervention to set the extent of compensation requirements, the level of equivalence to be met, the criteria for the creation of the bank and the delimitation of its service area, the type of credits and the damage assessment methods to be used, the long term protection and management regime or the integration into land-use planning. However, ecological compensation must remain a last resort, even if its effectiveness and its efficiency have been improved through sound habitat banking. Markets of ?biodiversity units? must not become an end in themselves, established only to facilitate the granting of permits and to make spatial development easier. One should consider them as means among others to achieve effective compensation, when the damage cannot be avoided and the project is justified by reasons of public interest. Otherwise, the risk is great that biodiversity concerns are sacrificed on the altar of socio-economic development. This requires not only a clear definition of the ?mitigation hierarchy? but also the restriction, by law, of the grounds for granting permits so as to prevent as much damage as possible, rather than relying on offsets and the translocation of species and habitats to places where they do not interfere with spatial development. Such an approach, however, implies the acceptance of more expensive alternative solutions to damaging projects, paying financial compensation to land owners under certain conditions and the implementation of an ambitious land policy in order to relocate the infrastructures. This is the real price to pay to conserve biodiversity and its services.