Biodiversity Net Gain / No Net Loss Commitments

No net loss commits a project to ensure its biodiversity impact is fully offset so the overall outcome is neutral relative to a defined baseline, while net gain goes further, requiring the project to leave biodiversity measurably better off than before, both frameworks increasingly required by regulators or adopted voluntarily by larger aquaculture companies for new site development or expansion, following a mitigation hierarchy that prioritizes avoiding impact first, then minimizing unavoidable impact, then restoring affected habitat on-site, and only using off-site biodiversity offsets as the last resort for residual impact that cannot otherwise be addressed. Measuring biodiversity change rigorously enough to verify a genuine net gain, rather than an optimistic but unverified claim, requires an agreed metric and baseline methodology, since biodiversity cannot be reduced to a single simple number the way carbon emissions can be measured in tonnes of CO2-equivalent, making net gain verification methodologically harder and more contested than equivalent carbon accounting despite following a conceptually similar before-and-after comparison logic. For aquaculture specifically, biodiversity impact assessment must account for both direct habitat impact at the farm site itself, mangrove or seagrass loss from pond construction, benthic community change beneath cages, and indirect impacts such as disease or genetic interaction risk with wild populations at the wild-farmed interface, meaning a complete biodiversity accounting exercise extends beyond the farm's immediate physical footprint. Offset projects, habitat restoration elsewhere compensating for unavoidable on-site impact, face the same additionality and permanence verification challenges as carbon offset projects, requiring credible proof that the restoration would not have happened anyway and will be durably maintained, not simply funded once and then left unmonitored.