A California-based non-profit has launched a crowdfunding campaign to finalise design work of a marine biodiversity protection credit standard, the first in a series if marine ecosystem credit classes it is planning to introduce to help scale ocean conservation finance.

Open Earth Foundation, involved in creating and deploying open source digital systems and solutions, is seeking to raise $8,900 on crowdfunding platform experiment.com to finalise work on a credit type for marine biodiversity protection it has been working on since last year.

“This budget will help us do a final convening of biodiversity credits scientists to review our current natural capital accounting methodology and equations, and support the data engineering tasks to turn the methods into open source python scripts, include sample eDNA data as direct measurement incorporations, and document that work,” the Open Earth entry said.

Starting last year, the group has been working on developing a methodology for the biodiversity credit work with an initial focus on supporting the Cocos Island Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Costa Rica, including a system for calculating marine biodiversity score and baseline maintenance.

However, the longer-term intention is to turn the methodology into open source code that scientists and governments can apply to other MPAs in a bid to boost funding for the chronically underfunded initiatives seen as crucial in order to meet the global target of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

“We have a working draft of the paper and of the data pipelines. Thanks to the experiment.com potential grant, we should be able to wrap them up within the next month or two,” Martin Wainstein, the foundation’s executive director, told Carbon Pulse.

“Once it’s published, it’s still a first full draft as a request for comment, ideally upgradeable by the open community,” he said.

Much of the work done by Open Earth’s ocean programme is related to the use of advanced digital technology to carry out measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of marine conservation work, which is time consuming and difficult to do in a precise fashion using traditional methods.

By using cutting edge technology, that work can be done faster and more precise, and by keeping the data in digital, open sources, methodologies and approaches can be checked as well as improved upon by third parties.

One organisation Open Earth is working with is New Atlantis, another California-based startup working along similar lines to create the basis for marine biodiversity credits.

“Their work complements ours as they focus on phytoplankton health as proxy of biodiversity. We hope they are the primary group that can implement and extend our biodiversity credit methodology,” said Wainstein.

MULTIPLE CLASSES

The marine biodiversity protection credit is only the first in a series of credit types that Open Earth is planning as part of its strategy to help scale up ocean conservation funding.

For biodiversity and other project types, it intends to create protection as well as restoration units, according to a white paper it published last November, outlining its ambitions on marine ecosystem credits.

Its reasoning is that most nature-related market-based mechanisms have been focusing on restoration, which means initiatives like Costa Rica’s Cocos Island MPA – which has operated for over 40 years – have no access because the work that has been done in the past has ensured the areas still have very high biodiversity baselines.

A similar discussion is currently ongoing in the carbon market, where some forestry-rich nations with historically low deforestation rates are now looking to be credited for maintaining their crucial forested areas.

Open Earth also plans to separate between effort-based and outcome-based schemes, to ensure that conservation efforts are rewarded for the costs involved.

Meanwhile, in addition to biodiversity, the foundation also plans to introduce eutrophication credits, plastic credits, and carbon credits in a catalogue of marine payment schemes.

Source: Open Earth Foundation

“In general, we see these tools as natural capital accounting assets which can be leveraged in financial mechanisms,” Wainstein said.

Such financing mechanisms can range from debt-for-nature swaps to direct credit sales or using credits as guarantees in conservation philanthropy, he added.

The approach aligns with plans or proposals flagged by several other organisations.

For example, UNEP is in talks with four Asian nations over bonds related to tiger ecosystem protection, where issued biodiversity credits have been proposed as one of the elements helping to underpin the programme.

Elsewhere, the Sustainability-linked Sovereign Debt Hub, a Geneva-based non-profit, has proposed links to nature markets as one of several solutions to help scale sustainability-linked sovereign debt-related bond issuances to address the debt crisis.

“To the best of our knowledge, there are no robust financial mechanisms that focus on marine ecosystems and their conservation. This is not only the case for marine restoration efforts, but also for the protection of intact marine ecosystems, which is the initial priority under the mitigation hierarchy for conservation,” Open Earth said in its white paper.

“Given the specificities of ocean systems and their complexities, we need to build adequate financial mechanisms for the protection of marine ecosystems, as well as clear units for metrics to be standardised, measured, and acted upon.”

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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