IPART is monitoring the NSW Biodiversity Credit Market
Healthy biodiversity is important for the quality of life of current and future generations. The biodiversity credits market plays a key role within the NSW Biodiversity Offsets Scheme to ensure biodiversity losses due to development or land clearing are offset by equivalent biodiversity gains at a price that reflects the efficient cost of conserving biodiversity.
We have been asked to monitor the biodiversity credits market for 3 years from 2022-23 and make findings and recommendations with the aim of:
- maintaining and promoting competition
- addressing the interests of existing and potential biodiversity market participants, and supporting fair trading
- identifying opportunities to improve market efficiency and address market failure.
Thank you to all stakeholders that made submissions to our Discussion Paper and attended our consultation workshops. Our Discussion Paper gave an overview of market activity in 2024-25 and proposed the focus areas for IPART’s monitoring review this year.
We have now published the presentation slides and a summary of the workshop discussions. The summary outlines the main issues raised by stakeholders regarding the NSW biodiversity credits market.
We have published all non-confidential submissions made to our Discussion Paper. We have also published a letter that we received from the Department in response to the feedback that we received from submissions and at our workshops.
IPART has recently sought a 3 month extension to the review to July 2026.
Feedback to our discussion paper will now help inform our draft findings and recommendations to the NSW Government. These will be detailed in our Draft Annual Report, to be published in April 2026. We will consider stakeholder feedback to our draft findings and recommendations as part of our Final report, to be published in July 2026.