‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Can’t financial incentives that reduce negative impacts lead to positive ones?
Not likely. Because corporations can offset impacts through operations in other countries, trading 
can also increase the incentive to acquire resources cheaply from poor countries. Power imbalances 
between the first and third world set the market value of resources. Commodities can be privatized 
and/or consumed as long as there is a willing buyer (eg an international corporation) and willing 
seller (eg a weak, poor government). In some cases, trading schemes could, therefore, facilitate wealth 
transfers from poor to rich. Effective ownership of natural capital can be alienated to special interests 
with no ties to the country. So it is important that we distinguish negative 
offsets
from positive 

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194
Positive Development
credits
. Emissions trading that allowed some to gain wealth by doing less harm was buttressed by the 
belief that pollution control costs extra and reduces productivity, goods and services. But we now 
know that this is untrue, at least in a whole systems perspective. Our institutional and intellectual 
frameworks need to keep up with our growing awareness of our interdependency with nature. A 
distinction between eco-service offset schemes and eco-service credit schemes would help to change 
the vocabulary that currently confuses mitigating future impacts with reducing existing impacts.
Eco-service credit schemes should ensure credits can only be gained by creating new or improved 
forms of production or development that increase natural capital and carrying capacity. In short, an 
eco-service 
credit
scheme would require net positive improvements over current conditions, not the 
reduction of damage as yet to be done.
Just how can trading systems be used to generate positive physical impacts?
By decoupling economic growth from ecological destruction. This could be partly achieved by a 
two-tiered incentive scheme: actions that undo the damage of previous development would generally 
get more points; actions that offset emissions of ongoing activity by the particular firm or industry 
would get less points. That is, we can make a distinction between:
•
Eco-service 
offset
schemes requiring physical offsets, such as new (hopefully viable) forests 
and wetlands. Mechanisms like wetlands banks or ecosystem service banks may be able to
create artificial wetlands that eventually become viable, eco-productive ecosystems where
land is currently degraded.
• 
Eco-service 
credit
systems requiring positive actions that reduce the negative impacts of 
past 
development or repair damaged ecosystems. Credits would only be given for positive actions
like ecological restoration in rural areas by farmers, or eco-retrofitting of cities by developers.
Net positive outcomes could, however, be achieved by outcomes and actions that have
positive effects on other sites.
Development can be designed to overcompensate physically for existing problems by increasing 
actual eco-services and the ecosystems that provide them (ie forests, reefs and wetlands).
21
But an 
‘incentive’ to solve environmental problems is not a solution in itself. In some cases, systems that 
enable firms to profit from reducing designed waste may slow the rate of ecological destruction. In 
other cases, as we have seen, they may also slow the transformation to sustainable systems. We need 
to ensure that trading systems do not have the effect of privatizing the means of survival in exchange 
for reducing future harm (a kind of systemic extortion).