Biodiversity credits could lead to organisations making inaccurate nature-positive claims because the lack of standards makes assessing their veracity impossible, a report has found.
Methods for reaching nature positive must build upon existing ways of reducing harm to nature, or risk greenwashing, the report led by University of Queensland said.
“Claiming to be aligned with nature positive on the strength of purchased [biodiversity] credits without fully addressing a company’s negative impacts is misleading at best,” it said.
It has been suggested that the term ‘nature positive’ take on a comparable role for biodiversity to that of ‘net zero’ for carbon, in the wake of the final agreement at COP15 conference last December, though it has yet to receive a globally recognised definition.
Biodiversity credits could become a “greenwashing pathway” for achieving claims of nature positive without delivering material outcomes, said Sophus zu Ermgassen, co-author of the paper and ecological economist at University of Oxford.
“The main risk with biodiversity credits is all in the claims you make from your purchase,” zu Ermgassen told Carbon Pulse.
Credits could allow organisations to claim they have achieved ‘no net loss’ or ‘net positive’ nature goals without working to reduce their impacts, he said.
Zu Ermgassen is working with others to define how a biodiversity credit can be part of delivering nature-positive outcomes, while not being the only action taken by companies.
The global biodiversity credit market is “quite far off” from the point where companies can use their purchases to make nature-positive claims, he predicted.
However, Australia’s potential use of biodiversity credits poses a “major immediate policy risk”, he said. “The government is toying with allowing organisations to compensate for damages using biodiversity credits, which will not necessarily be held to the same standards as biodiversity offsets.”
The Australian government’s approach to biodiversity conservation laws risks undermining the incentive for avoiding harm to biodiversity, in order to speed up development approvals, said the report, which was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The government, like the rest of the world, must incorporate the ‘mitigation hierarchy’ in pursuing nature positive, the report argued. The mitigation hierarchy is a framework used by developers to minimise their biodiversity loss.
If nature-positive methods replace established approaches, such as the mitigation hierarchy, they risk amounting to greenwashing, the report said.
“We are already seeing instances in which the embrace of nature positive is providing a platform for eroding the mitigation hierarchy,” it said.
“Without rigorous application of the mitigation hierarchy, policies that seek to achieve a net gain across a range of natural capital assets could lead to inappropriate substitution in which losses of one asset are considered part of a ‘net environmental gain’ if compensated by gains in others.”
Building on the mitigation hierarchy was “essential” for actions to be considered to be contributing to a nature-positive status, according to the report.
Earlier this month, a coalition of some of the largest environmental organisations and business groups launched the Nature Positive Initiative with the aim of defining the eponymous term.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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