Offset or Offsetting meaning

This Practice Note sets out the present landscape for biodiversity offsetting together with mandatory and voluntary nature markets. It covers what biodiversity offsetting entails, the defining features of nature markets, drivers for participants, market rules, the ‘stacking’ of multiple nature benefits, and the anticipated future direction of biodiversity offsets and nature markets. Overview What is biodiversity offsetting? Biodiversity offsetting is the means by which organisations carry out or finance environmentally restorative initiatives to balance out the harm they cause, whether directly or indirectly, to biodiversity through their operations and across their value chains. Biodiversity offsetting under planning laws Safeguarding, improving and ‘offsetting’ biodiversity effects has been entwined with the English planning system since before 2006, when the former Planning Policy Statement 9 (now incorporated into the National Planning Policy Framework) encouraged planning authorities to explore ways of maintaining, restoring or adding to networks of natural habitats and other landscape features. That guidance evolved into obligations on developers to offset their biodiversity impacts in the 2012...

First developed in collaboration with Dr Justin Macinante of Edinburgh Law School, The University of Edinburgh. Revised by Dalia Majumder‑Russell, Alex Ibrahim and Shinae Lee of CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang LLP. Conceptual context Emissions trading prices negative externalities—assigning costs to impacts that would not otherwise appear in the price of an activity, for example the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Such trading schemes may take the following forms: Cap‑and‑trade—participants face a limit on their emissions and are either issued allowances or buy them to cover those emissions. If they exceed the cap, they must acquire additional allowances from entities with a surplus or pay a penalty at the end of the relevant compliance period. Accordingly, cap‑and‑trade arrangements are compliance schemes. Baseline‑and‑credit—participants implement projects that reduce emissions below a defined baseline through avoidance, reduction, or removal (i.e., drawing pollutants from the atmosphere), thereby generating credits. These credits can be sold to other entities wishing to offset their carbon footprint...

This Practice Note explains how social security benefits paid to claimants after an accident, injury or disease are recovered. It describes how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), via the Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU), reclaims these sums from the compensator. It sets out the circumstances in which the compensator may set off specified benefits against particular heads of loss to prevent double recovery. It also outlines procedure for contributory negligence, multiple compensators, interim payments and periodical payments. The recovery system Following an accident, injury or disease, a claimant may receive state benefits. Under a statutory scheme, the DWP recoups those benefits from the compensator—either the defendant or, in most cases, the defendant’s insurer—through the CRU. Any compensator who makes a compensation payment in any case is liable to pay a sum equal to the total of the recoverable benefits. In turn, the compensator may deduct or recoup particular benefits against three categories of loss: loss of earnings cost of care loss of...