An India-based carbon developer has submitted a coral reef project in Indonesia’s West Papua for pilot status under Verra’s emerging biodiversity methodology, with plans for other project types already teed up.
Bengaluru-headquartered VNV Advisory Services has developed the Reefs for Resilience programme to help protect and restore coral reefs in West Papua that are under threat from climate change, rapid and unsustainable development, and overexploitation.
It began a reef restoration programme in biodiversity-rich West Papua last year, restoring half a hectare of degraded reef in 2022, but is now looking to scale that up using funds from prospective sales of biodiversity credits.
“VNV is in the process of registering the project as one of the first pilot projects under Verra’s SD VIsta Nature Framework methodology,” Kasturi Navalkar, a manager with VNV, told Carbon Pulse.
Verra issued a call for interested pilots for the new methodology in July, and the Indian company is eager to support the conceptualisation, building, and fine tuning of the methodology.
“Through this framework we will be able to verify the biodiversity outcomes of our project and issue tradable nature credits as standalone assets. The exact monitoring parameters are still to be ascertained, but broadly speaking, it will be about reef area restored, species abundance, and diversity,” Navalkar explained.
VNV has been developing carbon offset programmes for years and has a portfolio of almost 30 projects, most of them located in India, but a number of countries across South and Southeast Asia are also included.
The company has established sales offices in Singapore and the Netherlands, and plans to soon add biodiversity units to its offerings.
However, as the voluntary biodiversity credit market is still in its infancy, the company is focused on pilot efforts at the moment rather than rolling out large-scale projects.
“We are treading carefully for now, investing into a few pilots to test out the waters,” said Navalkar.
“We are unsure about how the EU companies are going to receive this, but it is an important area of work, so the space will have some demand, we expect. How the scale-up works remains to be seen.”
For the West Papua project, which is prioritising providing job opportunities for local communities, that means scaling up the area to be restored or preserved to about 3.5 hectares annually.
VNV has plans to introduce similar schemes across West Papua in the foreseeable future, but is also working on other project types elsewhere.
“We intend to expand our pilots to a couple more areas in Asia. We are working on a red panda corridor project in the Himalayas as well as a controlled fishing biodiversity programme in the Sundarban mangroves,” Navalkar said.
The move makes VNV one of the first carbon market participants to get involved in the biodiversity credit market, though many are expected to follow given the rapidly increasing number of carbon specialist companies offering nature-based solutions to voluntary buyers.
By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com
*** Click here to sign up to our weekly biodiversity newsletter ***
