Forest clearances, compensatory afforestation and biodiversity offsetting in forests: Balancing flexibility and equivalency in Switzerland

The settlement area is expanding at the cost of agricultural land in densely populated regions such as Central Europe. This development is also affecting the forest. Forest clearances due to, e.g. traffic and energy infrastructure development, require afforestation elsewhere but surfaces providing appropriate soil are increasingly scarce. Switzerland is an important case in point. It is densely populated, exhibits a large amount of forest – also in the lowlands – and although it features a strong forest protection law, it recently allowed compensating forest clearances with non-forest related offsets. Based on the results of a Q-methodology survey conducted during a stakeholder workshop, we show that pressure for more flexible forest specific rules largely stems from “outside” the forest sector, i.e. the agriculture and development sector. Only a small group of actors aims at reinstalling the more restrictive regime, whereas the largest group of actors embraces the status quo. This group rejects expansion of more flexible rules and adheres to strengthening the top of the mitigation hierarchy, i.e. prioritizing the mitigation of habitat loss caused by development. This interpretation of biodiversity offsetting aligns with the conviction that development needs to respect the limits of growth. Prioritizing the mitigation hierarchy requires a planning rather than a market coordination approach. We show that in a context with rigid biodiversity offsetting rules, following a multipurpose forest regime and with high land-use competition, stakeholder preferences impede the integration of habitat banking approaches into the planning of compensatory afforestation and biodiversity offsetting in the forest.