Cercarbono, a Colombia-based certifier of carbon projects, has approved a methodology that can be used to generate voluntary biodiversity credits, an emerging finance scheme aimed at supporting biodiversity conservation. This methodology, developed by U.S.-based company Savimbo in collaboration with the Indigenous peoples and local communities in Colombia’s Amazon, is the first of its kind to be approved.
“The methodology created by Savimbo is a significant advancement for our Indigenous communities,” Fernando Lezama, co-founder of Savimbo, traditional medicine doctor and Pijao tribal leader, said in a statement. “It is a simple, practical, and effective methodology developed by local people to benefit the health of the planet.”
Voluntary biodiversity credits are meant to be a way for companies to voluntarily invest in those who protect or restore nature, without any expectation of offsetting their environmental damage elsewhere. Every “unit” of habitat that gets preserved using the buyer’s money earns them a voluntary biodiversity credit.
However, various advocacy and Indigenous peoples organizations have concerns about the new scheme, as Mongabay has previously reported. Concerns include the lack of a demand for voluntary biodiversity credits, potential for greenwashing and problems coming up with a “value” for nature. Moreover, some Indigenous groups worry that the voluntary biodiversity credit scheme could suffer from the same issues as the carbon credit market, including unjust contracts with Indigenous communities, unscrupulous middlemen, funds that don’t ultimately reach the communities and complex science.
Savimbo’s methodology counters some of these problems by monitoring a predecided indicator species that communities think is valuable for the health of their ecosystems. To generate a credit, community members must document the presence of the species through photographic or video evidence in a given area of land over a set period of time. This scheme is functional in the Colombian Amazon, where some communities use the jaguar (Panthera onca) as their indicator species and generate biodiversity credits without any middlemen.
“Indigenous Peoples in every ecosystem monitor their forests with totemic animals,” Drea Burbank, co-founder of Savimbo, said in the statement. “We just translated that to science and automated it, then made it open-source to really fix the climate justice problem.”
According to Cercarbono, Savimbo’s methodology issues voluntary biodiversity credits “that can never be used to provide offsets of any kind.”
Mark Opel, a finance lead with the U.S.-based advocacy group Campaign for Nature, which came out with a report critiquing the voluntary biodiversity scheme in January, told Mongabay that while he wasn’t familiar with Savimbo’s methodology, he was skeptical that any methodology could overcome the fundamental issues with voluntary biodiversity credits.
“Biodiversity credits remain a distraction from the need for governments to increase public funding for nature and implement the policies, regulations and incentives that will drive more private investment in nature,” Opel said.
Banner image of jaguar by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
See related coverage of biodiversity credits:
Are biodiversity credits just another business-as-usual finance scheme?
Credits
