PhD student: Mrs S. Quarem

Promotors: C. Billiet, S. Rousseau

Duration: 1/8/2023 - 31/7/2027

Abstract:

Even though the value of biodiversity has been studied from different perspectives, the value of one individual specimen within a species population, its habitat and living environment as well as the value of an individual habitat within its context has not been studied extensively in the academic literature. Firstly, we will examine how biodiversity is explicitly and implicitly defined by the legislator. Based on a textual analysis we will investigate the interpretation of biodiversity and its elements in biodiversity conservation law by the legislator at the EU, Belgian and Flemish levels. Specifically, we will study the relative importance of species, genetic and ecosystem biodiversity (cf. definition by DeLong (1996)) as well the legislative focus on different typologies of species and habitat types (e.g. vertebrates vs non-vertebrates, aboveground vs belowground biodiversity). Besides an analysis of current legislation and the attention given to particular species, we will also create a brief history of the main evolution of the concept biodiversity in legislation. Secondly, we will analyze the collected decisions, studying how they handle legal decision criteria and factual aspects. Our analysis will be qualitative and quantitative, to an extent deemed appropriate in the light of our first findings. Specifically, we will study the importance of the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimize, restore and offset) on biodiversity impact assessment in permitting decisions. The mitigation hierarchy is a tool that is anchored in EU law and is frequently used to structure a biodiversity impact assessment in practice. We want to study how this tool is used in practice and which biodiversity impacts are more -or less- likely to be categorized as avoidable, minimized, restorable or as requiring offsetting. We will include an analysis of the conformity of the use of the mitigation hierarchy with the relevant EU law. A word clustering approach will be used to analyze the co-occurrence of concepts and to identify specific clusters. Thirdly, we will study the impact of economic, political, cultural and biological arguments on the categorization of biodiversity effects as having no effect, being negligible, slightly negative or negative. A multinomial logistic regression will be used to determine the correlation between, on the one hand, case characteristics (e.g. location, type of project), species characteristics (e.g. protection status), habitat characteristics (e.g. meadow, forest), impact type (e.g. number of specimens involved, size of the individual habitat, financial impacts), and, on the other hand, the categorization of the effects in biodiversity impact assessment. Finally, we will empirically investigate the choice between an administrative transaction (settlement) and an administrative fine by the environmental administration. A logistic regression analysis will allow us to comment on the impact of offender, offense and case characteristics. The main focal point will be the different elements of biodiversity value assessment included in the INVABIO framework.

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