Australia’s climate and biodiversity laws rely heavily on offset markets that treat ecosystems as interchangeable. But nature is not fungible, and the growing evidence of unique, localised species shows why offset systems are structurally incapable of protecting what is irreplaceable.

“Australia’s environment laws are broken.” How many times have we heard this in the last several years? It has been repeated ad nauseum by conservationists and business lobbyists alike, to the point where it now has no clear meaning. Of course, our environment laws are broken (or, to be more precise, have never been fully functional). But in the policy debates now playing out at the national, state, and regional levels, there is a fundamental problem – one which stems from a failure to understand the natural world.

Much of the basic architecture of Australia’s – and the world’s – climate and environmental protection systems are “marketised solutions”: trading systems for artificial credits or offsets, which are authorised by governments.

The basic idea is that an entity, usually a corporation, is permitted to undertake some level of environmentally damaging activity in exchange for money, which finances other activities designed to cancel out that damage. The creation of these offset markets is intended as a remedy for the market failures that lead directly to ecological destruction under the capitalist economic system – euphemistically referred to as “externalities”. Their appeal is that they provide a largely autonomous mechanism to restrict harmful activities that governments, for whatever reason, don’t want to ban outright.

There is no shortage of reporting on the failure of offset markets to deliver on this promise. Over and over again, investigations have revealed that both carbon and

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