A Switzerland-based startup is developing a concept that will allow farmers and land stewards to earn biodiversity credits for sustainable agriculture practices such as syntropic farming.

Recelio has just published a background document on its concept as part of preparations for the pre-seed funding round it is about to go into.

The company aims to have a final minimum viable product (MVP) developed by November and hopes to launch in early 2025, Christian Fu Mueller, co-founder and company vice president, told Carbon Pulse.

At the moment, recelio has a core team of six members, several of them with a background in agriculture and farming in the Global South, and that has helped shape the firm’s intent to address the nature and biodiversity crisis through that sector.

“Modern agriculture is designed to be very cost-effective, fast, produce big volumes, and focus on monocultures,” Mueller said. “All that is part of the problem.”

He noted that most early efforts to generate biodiversity credits are concentrated around conservation efforts, whereas the vast amount of agricultural land – some 5 billion hectares globally, of which a significant share has been depleted – has not been part of the equation.

The recelio team wants to reward farmers and land stewards opting for syntropic farming, an approach developed by Swiss farmer and researcher Ernst Goetsch that focuses on agro-biodiversity, ecological resilience, and food security.

While syntropic farming does not reach the same production levels as modern agriculture, it is very diverse, which improves resilience at a time when climate change is threatening, according to Mueller.

It also makes syntropic farmland ideal for creating biodiversity corridors that connect conserved, protected, or rewilded areas, which recelio says will allow for the movement and dispersal of species while also supporting agricultural production.

THE CREDITS

Mueller said the company has a network of largely smallholder farmers in Central and South America, as well as a lot of interest from Africa.

The plan is to start off with a small group of 10 or so pilot plots of land located in a single area, probably somewhere in the Americas, and then grow from there.

Recelio will set up a separate commercial company to oversee the crediting programme, which will be digital – with units to be known as dynamic Biodiversity Tokens (dBTs) – for reasons of transparency and traceability.

They will be similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the sense that no two tokens will be the same.

A farmer with 50 hectares covered by the scheme can choose whether want to generate 50 dBTs of 1 hectare each, 1 dBT covering all 50 hectares, or somewhere in between.

The credits will also contain information about a number of biodiversity indicators, and the data will be a mix of quantitative, qualitative, and transcontextual, which makes them difficult to harmonise.

But unlike NFTs, the data attached to the tokens can and will be updated over time as new data is collected, meaning the credits will gain value if a project is successful, but lose value if something goes wrong.

To allow the market to hedge against the risk of losing value, recelio will allow fractions of dBTs to trade, so that an investor can put money in a large number of projects, instead of betting everything on just one or two.

The credits will be tradeable on a blockchain-based marketplace, with a small royalty going back to the land steward or farmer every time their units transact.

In addition there will be a second type of token – dynamic Land Steward Tokens (dLTs).

They will only be available to land stewards participating in the scheme, but similar to the dBT they will change over time as the steward gains experience and achieves good results. That change will also be reflected in the dBTs generated from that steward’s projects.

Recelio does not plan to introduce any restrictions on who can trade the biodiversity tokens, and its latest paper lists a number of potential buyer types – corporate offsetters or insetters, impact investors, philanthropists, foundations, governments, and retailers and individuals.

Before each individual project launches there will be a basic assessment of the plot of land and the plants and animals that live there, which will help determine the starting price of credits from that area, Mueller explained.

Guidelines around monitoring, reporting, and verification and other crucial fundamentals are yet to be finalised, including on whether or to what degree recelio will work with offset standard groups, such as Verra and Plan Vivo, which are both developing project methodologies for the fledgling biodiversity market.

GOING SMALL

Mueller said that while most programmes like environmental markets are targeting large landholders, he expected most participants in recelio’s scheme to be smallholders.

“It’s not that we will reject the big guys, but the scheme will concentrate on stewards rather than landholders. And we know what stewards in the Global South look like – most of them are women working on small pieces of land,” he said.

He stressed the difficult situation for many farmers worldwide who are forced to opt for monocultures and GMOs while facing the risk of crop failure, which he said is expected at large scale in several regions this year, including Asia and Central Europe.

“Asking farmers to put even more land aside [for biodiversity purposes] would be putting an even heavier burden on them,” Mueller said, hoping that bringing biodiversity credit opportunities would be a boon instead.

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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