In the two years since biodiversity credits garnered a prominent mention in the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) aimed at halting the loss of wildlife, a flurry of projects and methods that underpin those credits have sprung onto the scene. Numerous reports have tried to keep up with these new initiatives, including the Biocredit Catalogue, which documents nearly a dozen developers working on methods. But less than a year after it was published, the authors say it’s already out of date. Another recent report from Switzerland-based nonprofit organization NatureFinance found more than 30 biodiversity credit projects at some stage of development on the African continent alone. Just as these projects have proliferated, so too have the methods used to monetize them. The umbrella term “biodiversity credit” encompasses a wide range of approaches for calculating the value of those credits that can seem impenetrably complex, making them magnets for criticism. In part, that’s because these approaches attempt to peg a value to the conservation benefits a credit might provide — or, as critics put it, “put a price on nature” — across widely varied landscapes, ranging from mountain forests in Colombia to mangroves in Kenya. According to proponents and critics, this variation makes comparisons between ecosystems nearly impossible — and inadvisable in most cases. But the wave of activity around biodiversity credits, including a prominent role in discussions at the 2024 U.N. biodiversity conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, demonstrates that many have pinned their hopes on this strategy to help tackle…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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