Initiated by BOOST consortium, this special issue in Ambio focuses on biodiversity impact avoidance, footprinting, and biodiversity offsetting in policy and practice.

As governments and businesses increasingly commit to ambitious biodiversity targets, questions surrounding the mitigation hierarchy, biodiversity footprinting, nature credits, and biodiversity offsetting have become increasingly important. This special issue examines how these approaches and the measures associated with them can be designed and governed to support national and international biodiversity targets. It focuses on five key questions:

1. How can the mitigation hierarchy be operationalized in practice to ensure that biodiversity impact avoidance is prioritized over compensation?
2. Under which ecological, legal, and institutional conditions can biodiversity offsetting or nature credits deliver real biodiversity gains?
3. What governance safeguards are needed to prevent greenwashing and ensure legitimacy, transparency, and equity in biodiversity offsetting schemes?
4. How can biodiversity footprints, including indirect impacts through global supply chains, be measured and accounted for in a scientifically robust and policy-relevant way?
5. How can financial and accounting systems be reformed to internalize biodiversity impacts and align economic incentives with biodiversity policy targets?
   
   

We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological, and policy-oriented contributions from a range of disciplines, including ecology, economics, law, governance, and sustainability science. Read more about the special issue and submission details here: https://link.springer.com/collections/gjigdfgcfb

Guest editors: Dr Megan Evans Evans (UNSW Canberra) and Dr Niak Sian Koh (Oxford Nature Positive Hub)

Journal: Ambio

Submission deadline: 31 March 2027