Discussion on papers 9 and 10

P. Grenell

Grenell and Associates, California

I was involved when a series of recommendations concerning land protection, including a 'no net loss' recommendation in 1988, was put together. One of the things that we grappled with for an entire year was the context in which the discussion of no net loss occurs. If you had a conclave to develop a no net loss policy for the UK now, as opposed to if you had a different government, I would wager that the outcome would be somewhat different. The fact that for the first time in US history a policy of no net loss was adopted was something significant, even though no-one liked it. On the other hand, it meant that the policy was somewhat in the right direction because most of the extreme comments came from the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Do you see any likelihood of a consideration of no net loss, given one primary precondition, which would be that no net loss considers both short-term and longterm impacts to cover the likely range of concerns from both sides of the spectrum?