The UK’s environment secretary Thérèse Coffey and France’s state minister Bérangère Couillard have launched a global roadmap to support companies to contribute to nature recovery.
The UK-French Global Biodiversity Credits Roadmap, which was launched at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact hosted in Paris last month, will build on efforts to mobilise global nature finance in support of the COP15 Biodiversity Framework agreed in Montreal last December, which aims to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.
The roadmap sets out a plan to scale up global efforts to support companies buying credits that contribute to the recovery of nature and aims to facilitate the sharing of best practice on the governance mechanisms for credit funding, monitoring regimes to ensure biodiversity improvements, and the fair distribution of income to indigenous peoples and local communities.
It will also work towards key international milestones, such as the 2024 Un Biodiversity Conference (COP16), where the UK Government website says financing for biodiversity will be high on the agenda.
A UK-French initiated advisory panel was also announced, which would “pool together expert voices from around the world to form and guide diverse working groups to drive forward positive change”.
At the time of the announcement, Coffey said: “Mobilising finance is key to meeting the global goals set out in the COP15 agreement. Initiatives like the roadmap on biodiversity credits launched today will help ensure private sector financing is leveraged to conserve and restore nature. We’re grateful to be working alongside France and look forward to collaborating with many other countries and organisations in delivering the roadmap.”
Biodiversity credits, a nascent market
Although the concept of biodiversity credits has been modelled on carbon credits, unlike the carbon credit market in which companies compensate their emissions through the purchase of credits from companies that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, biodiversity credits allow companies to invest directly in projects that have a positive impact on nature either by enriching or by restoring biodiversity in areas such as rainforests, oceans, grasslands or other habitats globally.
The credits work by recording where the environmental action has taken place, who has developed it, and how it is measured and checked but according to Ann Meoni, senior sustainability analyst at Abrdn, more work needs to be done in what is still a nascent industry.
“Biodiversity credits are more complex than carbon credits because biodiversity differs by location and that really complicates the unit of credit. Where we are more comfortable currently is with high integrity carbon credits with strong additional benefits,” she said.
“There is a big financing gap right now for the restoration of nature and this is a mechanism that could help to address that,” she said. “There is so much potential to restore nature and create more resilient ecosystems. We’ve seen pockets of this being done very well, now we need to finance that at scale, and for that you need a market that is investable.”
Source: UK Government and Ministère de la Transition écologique et de la Cohésion des territoires
