Commodification, labor, abstraction: three key concepts to understand the many-headed hydra of biodiversity offsetting

Natural capital approaches to mitigating the impacts of construction projects, in which environmental harms and mitigations are calculated and then traded, have become dominant features of contemporary conservation. They are subject to considerable critique within the political ecology and radical conservation literatures on the grounds that they involve the commodification of nature. In the case of biodiversity offsetting, the commodification process in question is often described as involving forms of abstraction, pictured as a subtractive, reductive, 'lossy' process that reduces messy ecologies to quantitative and exchangeable credits. This article seeks to develop a different understanding of abstraction, pointing towards a more generative and creative account in which it creates a range of niches for different types of value extraction, including rent, labor exploitation and knowledge commodity creation. The aim is to provide a more precise account of when and where knowledge commodities are produced in credit creation, and to understand their relationship to a wider 'many-headed hydra' of value extraction from nature.