ABSTRACT
Ecological compensation has existed in France since the 1976 law on the protection of nature. It has only really been applied for about a decade, however, following the reform of environmental impact studies in particular. Many questions remain unresolved, such as the choice of the implementation system and the effects that this will have on the objective of no net loss of biodiversity mentioned in the law. This chapter first describes the different systems for implementing ecological compensation in France: permittee-responsible mitigation (PRM), natural compensation sites (NCS) and emerging territorial approaches. It puts these management models into perspective, together with the compensation principles to which they are supposed to refer. The examples we are studying show that the expected effects of each of the systems are not fulfilled with regard to the principles of ecological compensation. We compare the achievement of the following principles: the effectiveness of compensatory measures, the durability of these compensatory measures, the ecological equivalence and the proximity of the sites of compensatory measures with the places impacted. Having a large site with contiguous plots does not always occur in the NCS framework. The durability of the compensatory measures is also relative, as its duration is limited to 30 years. The characterisation of the NCS system in relation to the PRM system is much less clear in the United States
There is therefore a gap between what we think we are doing and what we are actually doing. This chapter also shows that examples from “territorial” approaches can help to meet a number of principles required to achieve no net loss of biodiversity.
