For nature markets to be effective, they must:
- Generate significant financial resources promptly.
- Ensure fair prices that benefit nature’s primary guardians and promote its conservation and restoration.
- Yield verifiable positive impacts on nature, climate, and people.
Independent standards for biodiversity credits have emerged as essential frameworks to ensure the transparency, credibility, consistency, and genuine environmental impact of nature market projects. The standards listed below are developed by third-party organisations and provide rigorous guidelines on how biodiversity credits should be generated, verified, and traded. They address various aspects, such as the baseline assessments of biodiversity, methodologies for measuring impacts, and monitoring and verification procedures. Adopting independent standards ensures that credits represent real, measurable, and additional conservation outcomes. Furthermore, such standards bolster market confidence by ensuring transparency and accountability, while also facilitating the scaling of investments in biodiversity conservation.
Global Standards
Gold Standard Foundation
All Gold Standard certified projects must assess their potential environmental and social impacts and implement mitigation measures where necessary. Specifically, for land use activities this means following safeguarding principles that protect water resources, soil erosion + degradation, access to food, livestock wellbeing and areas with a high conservation value.
Plan Vivo Foundation
The new PV Nature Methodology, developed in partnership with Pivotal, is founded on the principle that Plan Vivo Biodiversity Certificates (PVBCs) will only be issued where there is high-quality, auditable data that provides evidence of biodiversity outcomes. In other words, PVBCs are only issued only where there is evidence that species and habitats have benefited.
Each PVBC will represent measured, evidenced outcomes delivered for biodiversity – either via ecosystem restoration or the protection of globally important species and habitats. PVBCs represent holistic biodiversity outcomes, assessed and evidenced across a broad range of the aspects of biodiversity that underpin ecosystem health.
Verra
Verra is developing a nature crediting framework and biodiversity methodology under its Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard (SD VISta) Program that will enable projects to issue standalone, transactable, and standardized nature credits by certifying projects’ high-quality conservation and restoration outcomes.
Verra’s Nature Framework is currently open for public consultation.
National Standards
Accounting for Nature
Accounting for Nature is a transparent, affordable, verifiable and certifiable environmental accounting framework to inform better investment, policy and management decisions in natural capital. These include carbon co-benefits, green bonds, environmental offsets and impact investments.
Eco-Markets Australia
The Reef Credit Scheme is a market-based solution to incentivise water quality improvements across catchments of the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef Credit Scheme enables land managers to undertake projects that improve water quality through changes in land management to generate a tradeable unit of pollutant reduction or ‘Reef Credit’. A Reef Credit represents a quantifiable volume of nutrient, pesticide or sediment prevented from entering the Great Barrier Reef catchment.
The relative value of pollutant reduction from nutrient, sediment or pesticide is set using the reef wide pollution reduction targets described in the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan (2018). These values will be periodically amended by the Reef Credit Secretariat to reflect changes to the pollution reduction targets. A Reef Credit can then be sold to those seeking to invest in water quality improvements, such as government, private industry and philanthropists.