Is it time to talk about spatial standards for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)?
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) became mandatory for most planning applications in February 2024 after a six year lead-in. As such, developers are now legally required to assess the habitats on land they are developing, evaluate the impact their development will have and commit to a minimum of 10% biodiversity net gain (whether on- and/or off-site). These enhancements must be legally secured for a period of 30 years, governed either by a s106 agreement (normally with the local authority) or by a conservation covenant with a Responsible Body.
At its heart BNG is a spatial concept – dividing up surveyed sections of land based on assessed attributes (distinctiveness, condition, etc.) and calculating the associated area and value – almost perfectly designed to be undertaken and governed by a Geographic Information System (GIS). Despite being inherently spatial, the legal recording, submission and storage of BNG information is required to be carried out in an entirely non-spatial way. That is not to say that GIS isn’t involved in BNG; it plays a major part, and the initial assessments and projections of habitat enhancement would be virtually impossible without it. But it does seem counterintuitive to take data that:
- Knows where it is;
- Knows what it is;
- Can be easily shared in open-source formats; and
- Provides a visual representation
…and dumb it down to a series of rows in a table. GIS provides all of the functionality required by BNG, and aside from the final step of presenting it in the metric spreadsheet, it will be the tool used by the vast majority of consultancies involved in development. Losing the crucial spatial element at the regulatory stage seems like a wasted opportunity to provide useful data long into the future.
As a Responsible Body (tasked with hosting the relevant BNG information for conservation covenants), RSK Biocensus have already had sight of geospatial data in a variety of formats, conforming to different schemas and with a range (or lack) of attribution and metadata. However, no geospatial standards have been defined for the presentation of GIS data associated with BNG, and so it is very much left up to the individual business how they go about this.
At the macro level, at some point in the future surely Defra’s biodiversity gain sites register will become spatially enabled. Statistics will be sought about how successful BNG has been, where it has been most successful and information sought regarding the impact BNG has had on the surrounding habitats and wider areas. Having instant and query-able, spatially-enabled data provides countless efficiencies across the process, and would utilise GIS software as it is designed, rather than treating it as a method for simply storing geometries. The raw data that generated the vast majority of the records in the register will already be sat in a geospatial format somewhere, so before we get too far down the road perhaps it is time to define how and where this information should be presented.
At the micro level, having an open-source, standardised GIS template to contain BNG data would provide consistency and transferability of spatially-enabled information between businesses. Data would be easily shared and ingested into databases, and garnering information from across multiple sites or land parcels would become a very simple automated task.
With a lack of published standards around all of the above, it is perhaps beholden upon industry to take the lead (perhaps in partnership with Defra and/or Natural England), define these things and agree upon a set of principles for how we capture, store and share spatially enabled BNG data. BNG is admired internationally as a means of delivering nature restoration through the planning process, so it is essential to make sure that the benefits are captured as efficiently, consistently and transparently as possible.
Rich Howe – Principal GIS Consultant