The biodiversity credit protocol expected to be launched by Plan Vivo later this year will strive to offer an approach with scientific credibility that is also accessible to communities and can be rolled out at scale, heard a recent conference on nature-based solutions.

Plan Vivo has been testing its draft biodiversity protocol on seven pilot projects that are globally spread across different landscapes and regions, with different governance structures and land tenure models, said Toral Shah, biodiversity coordinator at Plan Vivo Foundation at the First Annual Conference on Nature-based Solutions using Carbon and Biodiversity Credit Funding, hosted at the University of Lincoln in northern England on Friday.

Two of the pilots are marine, with one a seascape restoration project based in the south of England in the Solent, and the other a mangrove restoration project in the Honduras.

“One of the key pieces of feedback from the public consultation put out earlier this year has been the issue of trade-offs and trying to find a balance between developing an approach that has scientific credibility, but also is accessible to these communities and people on the ground and that can be rolled out at scale,” said Shah.

“Other areas of feedback received is around designing an approach that is not too complicated, not just at implementation stage, but also for communicating to people, communities and other stakeholders, and also in designing an approach that is more or less standardised across projects,” she added.

The Plan Vivo biodiversity methodology will take a participatory approach with a transparent equitable benefit-sharing mechanism for the communities involved, she explained.

The aim for PV Nature is to generate high integrity biodiversity certificates that deliver credible and robust benefits not just for nature and biodiversity, but also bring positive climate and social impacts.

Plan Vivo has been clear from the outset that its resultant certificates won’t be targeted for offsetting, but rather for nature positive pledges.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Shah confirmed that the Plan Vivo methodology will be based on a percentage change unit and will require a minimum number of indicators to be monitored using standardised ecosystem and species-based indices across projects.

Since reported in January, the methodology states that proponents must choose at least four metrics that are relevant to biodiversity within a project area, and credits are then issued as equivalent to a 1% gain for restoration, or as no measured loss for conservation in the metrics, per hectare. The revised methodology will be available for review later this year.

This is different to the “basket of metrics” method first developed by science-based research group Wallacea Trust, who also spoke at the event.

For marine projects, Plan Vivo’s focus groups will include fish, to allow the measurement of a range of tropic levels, and submerged aquatic vegetation and sessile invertebrates as another group. It’s tricky to disentangle the latter two groups, said Shah, while combining them also allows for the monitoring of both habitat and species change under one roof.

Projects will also be able to choose other groups to monitor that may be more specific to a particular eco region or ecosystem.

Plan Vivo has partnered with Pivotal Future on technical support for the methodology, and all projects will be reviewed by academics, regional specialists, and third-party auditors.

The Plan Vivo approach will be auditable, scalable, and will also allow for the use of innovative technologies for monitoring and measurement purposes, while placing emphasis on community participation and local knowledge.

Digital technologies have a huge potential to sensitise and educate local communities about life under the water and how it is worth protecting, said Shah.

Biodiversity credit projects offer “huge potential” to contribute to the global target of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, she said.

“Unlike many carbon projects that often focus on seagrass or mangroves, partly due to the nature of existing carbon methodologies, biodiversity credits offer huge potential to encompass wider seascape-level projects with a mosaic of habitats and allow for the protection or restoration of much bigger projects that often carbon financing alone doesn’t support,” she explained.

PRIORITIES

The sale of biodiversity credits offers great potential to help support vulnerable coastal communities in the Tropics that are vulnerable to climate change, sea level rise and that are dependent on coastal environments for their living, said Shah.

In the marine environment, Plan Vivo also values taking a seascape approach to the generation of biodiversity credits.

“We know that there is connectivity and positive feedback systems between habitats, so we really need to look at these as a seascape level and this will allow us to really monitor the wider ecosystem function and impact and likely have more positive outcomes than just focusing on one habitat,” said Shah.

Marine protected areas could also draw much needed funding through the generation of biodiversity credits, she added.

STAKEHOLDERS AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Plan Vivo aims to ensure that local communities are well considered and incorporated in project design as doing so “is really important for the success of the project to extend beyond the project period for long-term impact”, said Shah.

Incorporating government bodies into the design process of biodiversity credits will also be key, given the close government oversight of many coastal areas and need to ensure that financing stays with the communities, she said.

Ultimately, Plan Vivo aims to strike a balance between empowering local communities to protect and enhance their environment, while not limiting access to resources and promoting sustainable livelihoods.

It’s a tricky balance to achieve and one that is linked to “de-risking the project from a bias perspective” and pricing credits fairly, said Shah.

Under the Plan Vivo biodiversity protocol, the monitoring of social impact will be done by engaging with communities on an annual basis to understand whether their needs are being met.

A resilience framework is also underway to understand how biodiversity, climate, and social impact can be demonstrated more broadly across all of its projects, both for carbon and biodiversity credits, which will enable the generation of more progress indicators, said Shah.

FAIR PRICING

The pricing of credits needs to reflect all the work involved, including the biodiversity monitoring, protecting, or restoring the environment, while also compensating for the loss of opportunity costs for the local community, said Shah.

The amount and type of community participation will influence the pricing of credits too, particularly where community members are directly involved with monitoring projects.

“When it comes to the number of credits we generate – we’re trying to base that on a data trend, establishing a reliable trend on what is happening on the ground to be able to determine how many likely restoration or conservation certificates to generate,” said Shah. In that way, Plan Vivo is moving away from using reference sites, she said.

Marine projects are likely to be a bit smaller in scale than terrestrial projects initially, she added.

Plan Vivo is also piloting mechanisms to potentially stack biodiversity credits on top of carbon credits, but it’s a work in progress and will ultimately depend on what a project is trying to achieve, said Shah.

“It’s about defining what you are trying to achieve and what are your objectives. Does that mean that you should focus on trying to create biodiversity impact and then generate biodiversity credits, or is carbon sequestration in the form of carbon credits? It’s really about trying to define that theory of change first, before saying let’s go for biodiversity credits or let’s go for carbon, or let’s stack. It will be about what is best for that location. We haven’t yet outlined how we’re going to measure that.”

By Bryony Collins – bryony@carbon-pulse.com

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