Land conversion and compensation

Many sustainability standards programmes aim to reduce or prevent the conversion of habitats with high conservation values into production areas. Often they specify that land managed by certificate holders cannot be converted, or cannot have been converted since some cut-off date. But what happens if a manager buys land that was converted by another party after the cut-off? Should that land be permanently excluded from the certification programme, whoever manages it, and however well-managed it might be in future? Should a new manager forfeit any certificates previously issued in respect of its own land, because it has bought converted land? Should there be a pathway for an owner who converted land in the past, after the cut-off date, to seek to restore it to achieve certification?

WWF commissioned OneWorldStandards to investigate potential models for landowners to provide compensation for past conversions (including, for example, through restoration of degraded land, or additional protections), in order to secure long-term net gains in terms of ecosystem function and local livelihoods without creating loopholes that would legitimise conversion and circumvent cut-off dates.

The review considered a range of legal models for compensation, and considered the application of such models to management units with differing proportions of land for which conversion is prohibited under the rules of a certification programme.

It concluded that for voluntary programmes, a simple mathematical model can be developed to relate overall profitability to the relative profitability of certified land management and non-certified land management, and to the proportion of otherwise productive land that would have to be taken out of management due to a programme’s rules prohibiting conversion. The model implies that the potential of voluntary programmes to prevent the legal conversion of land is inherently limited. If certified land management is to be at least as profitable as non-certified land management, some way needs to be found to compensate managers for their loss of productive land.

The model also places limits on the potential to require managers to pay compensation (whether in cash or kind) voluntarily, if they wish to maintain profitability whilst participating in a certification programme, compared to the alternative of choosing not to pay compensation and accessing markets for non-certified production.


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