France and the UK announced on Thursday they are initiating a broad consultative process for the creation of an international biodiversity market with the intention of having a framework ready by the UN’s COP16 summit in Turkey next year.

A global roadmap towards developing a credible biodiversity credit market was presented at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, with French minister of ecology Berangere Couillard and UK environment minister Therese Coffey heading up a panel that also included the president of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba, and officials from Brazil, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Creating a [biodiversity] market will not be easy, it will not be straightforward, but it will be crucial,” the UK’s Coffey said.

“Mobilising finance is key to meeting the global goals set out in the COP15 agreement. Initiatives like the Roadmap on Biodiversity Credits launched today will help ensure private sector financing is leveraged to conserve and restore nature. We’re grateful to be working alongside France and look forward to collaborating with many other countries and organisations in delivering the roadmap.”

A high-level advisory committee, co-chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett for the UK and Sylvie Goulard for France and with the Global Environment Facility (GEF) also playing an important role, will be established, with the coalition to then present a concept of what a global nature market might look like at the climate COP28 summit in Dubai this December.

The group will then work with an extended circle of stakeholders, including national government representatives, market participants, Indigenous peoples and local communities, and others, to present a final framework in Turkey in late 2024 at the UN’s biodiversity COP16 summit.

Based on that framework, the intention is to initiate various pilots around the world by 2026, according to Coffey.

The overall aim is to create a market that can play a central role in closing the massive funding gap needed to adequately fend off the global nature and biodiversity loss crisis.

STARTING POINT

France commissioned consultancies NatureFinance and Carbone 4 to author a paper outlining the main challenges in creating a credible and equitable market, that will function as a starting point for the discussions ahead.

In it, the authors outlined five core design challenges for a global market:

• Providing credible, timely, and affordable measurement and monitoring of the state, improvement, and/or maintenance or biodiversity
• Scaling sustained and high-integrity demand for credits and associated financing
• Ensuring sufficient high-integrity supply of credits that offer nature positive outcomes
• Securing adequate price and equitable distribution of rewards to project developers, sovereigns, and Indigenous Peoples and local communities
• Establishing robust governance and broader, transparent institutional arrangements

“These inter-related design challenges can and must be addressed to ensure that the rise of biodiversity credits/certificates and biodiversity-positive carbon credits deliver scaled, equitable, positive outcomes for people and the planet,” the report said.

“Across all of the core design challenges it will be important to cultivate markets for biodiversity credits which take advantage, where adequate, of architectural synergies with the carbon market infrastructure.”

HAND IN HAND

The market construction will consider pure biodiversity credits as well as biodiversity-positive carbon credits.

President Ondimba of Gabon said in a comment at the announcement event that nations such as his own, which haven’t caused major domestic deforestation issues, aren’t being adequately rewarded for their efforts under the current carbon market, and that a biodiversity market needed to make sure that carbon credits in the future take biodiversity benefits into account.

Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy CEO Jennifer Morris said at the event that while the new market must be based on good science, there was no time to wait years for it to develop.

“That means that [host] countries need to develop the enabling framework before the projects start,” she said.

Morris argued that for biodiversity-positive carbon credits there was no need to reinvent the wheel, and that the market should opt to use the existing Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) standard.

“When it’s just biodiversity it must be done in a localised way. It will be difficult to create a global market for just biodiversity,” she said.

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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