Local people's preferences for housing development-associated Biodiversity Net Gain in England

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in England is a recently legislated mechanism for ensuring that the biodiversity impacts of new developments are appropriately mitigated. Despite the assumption that some elements, such as the preference for locally implemented offsetting of impacts, should provide benefits for people, the policy's focus is on ecological outcomes. The social feasibility of BNG guidelines has not been properly tested, nor has their generalisability across people and places. Understanding the preferences of local project-affected people for Biodiversity Net Gain and incorporating this into both policy and project-level decision-making is a critical step for managing trade-offs ex-ante, thereby maximising the likelihood that BNG projects benefit people's wellbeing. Using a choice experiment of hypothetical BNG projects in the context of housing development, we examine the trade-offs between the features of the BNG project: distance from home; biodiversity level (species richness); off-site vs on-site biodiversity provision; public access to the offset site; and a non-biodiversity feature (provision of affordable housing). We found that public access and species richness were proportionally more important than proximity and the percentage provision of affordable housing. These preferences were of course, heterogeneous and determined by sociopsychological variables, e.g., captured in the notions of "attachment to place", connectedness to nature, socio-economic variables and rural versus urban location. The preferences expressed identify a range of BNG approaches that respect peoples' preferences and trade-offs, noting that acceptance depends to a great degree on outcomes that are either not an explicit priority (i.e., species richness) or are disincentivised (i.e., public access) by current BNG policy. For BNG to be publicly acceptable and socially sustainable, the study concludes that policy and practice must be flexible enough to incorporate place-specific preferences, especially relating to aspects of access to nature, localised notions of biodiversity, and broader cultural and aesthetic consequences of the development.