A US-based startup working with Indigenous small farmers in the Amazon on conservation initiatives has begun pre-sales of its fair trade biodiversity credits, while expecting its indicator species biodiversity methodology to earn its first market standard certification by October.

Savimbo, which launched in Feb. 2022, has signed up 135 farming families and four Indigenous groups covering a total of 4,500 hectares of pristine rainforest in the Colombian Amazon to participate in its biodiversity programme.

By agreeing to protect instead of hunt certain threatened species such as jaguars, birds, or frogs, the farmers get a chance at sharing in the revenue from the expected sales of Savimbo’s expected biodiversity credits, with many also participating in the group’s fair trade carbon credit programme.

“These are people who have no education, who speak no English. It’s hard to explain markets to them, and they have been subject to exploitative behaviour,” Drea Burbank, Savimbo’s founder and CEO, told Carbon Pulse.

When she first came to the region, Burbank noticed how the locals did much of the conservation work and other jobs for visitors, such as jaguar tracking, but they never received any money, which tended to remain in Bogota.

Savimbo was founded on the idea that farmers would be paid a guaranteed minimum price for any credits generated from their property through conservation efforts that were already beginning to take place, and then share in Savimbo’s profits once the credits were sold into the market without the involvement of intermediaries.

60 DAYS

Savimbo’s methodology, currently posted for public consultation and attracting comments and suggestions from various biodiversity and market experts, has been written to be as similar as possible to the Cercarbono standard’s REDD+ methodology, with additional sections on credit calculation, as biodiversity varies greatly from carbon on that aspect.

Burbank said it had been built on the Wallacea Trust’s ‘basket of indicators’ protocol, but taking the approach that a full basket would be too complicated and that Savimbo could get credits to the market faster with a single indicator species.

Briefly put, one of Savimbo’s biodiversity credits represents 60 days of the presence of the pre-defined indicator species at an area of 1 hectare – counted as 30 days before and after the landowner’s documented sighting.

The projects will focus on conservation, not restoration, and the landowners will not receive more credits should the number of indicator species on their property increase.

“You either have a harpy eagle on your land or you don’t. And anything less, or incremental improvements, just doesn’t really qualify,” said Burbank.

Some of the Indigenous peoples involved lead nomadic life styles, which means that there will be project areas not monitored – and hence not credited – some of the time.

While simple enough in principle, some of the comments received in the consultation process contended that the technicalities around overlapping areas with sightings and other elements deciding the number of credits to be issued are too complicated in the draft version, according to Burbank, who told Carbon Pulse that a slightly simplified version will be released later this month.

The founder said Savimbo’s main innovation is making calculations more complex, and then automating them.

“[We will be] using public data for anything that would be debated and dramatically simplifying the requirements for on-the-ground measurement while making them hard to fudge,” she said.

“It’s designed by, and for, Indigenous groups, so as long as any market will accept it, we want to get it public.”

FARMER’S MARKET

The company expects Medellin-based environmental standard Cercarbono to approve its methodology in October.

It has also sought approval from Plan Vivo, but expects that process to take a bit longer as Plan Vivo is still developing its biodiversity standard.

For its newly launched pre-sales, Savimbo charges $5 per credit, with much of the sales based on word of mouth, given one of the company’s backers is a social media influencer with some 150 million followers on TikTok.

“Consumers really like us, so we trust them and advocacy groups to be backing up our institutional sales,” said Burbank.

The company is increasing the number of participating farmers by around 20% per month, and is also expanding geographically, with the first Ecuadorian landowners recently signed up.

In addition, through logging companies with permission to clear land but without the conviction to do so, Savimbo also has the opportunity to extend its project activities to an area of 10,000 ha in Fiji.

Unlike some other early movers in the biodiversity market, Savimbo does not object to its credits trading in a secondary market but rather encourages this, as 7% of each transaction will go back to the company and to the farmers.

Savimbo will not, however, allow its credits to be used for offsetting purposes.

“We don’t want to be involved in that at all,” said Burbank.

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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