An Italian environmental consultancy told Carbon Pulse that its public-private model can enable private sector finance to flow into improving biodiversity outcomes while ensuring cohesion with targets agreed under the Global Biodiversity Framework.
University of Padova spin-out consultancy Etifor told Carbon Pulse that while work on biodiversity credits is welcome, corporates should ensure that they start with their materiality assessments and aim to fit in with public sector targets for biodiversity.
“You can be a ‘nature-positive’ company, but we have to be aligned in a collective way for a nature-positive future,” Alessandro Leonardi, CEO of Etifor, told Carbon Pulse in an interview.
“We need to make sure that the private sector finance is going in the direction of the collective targets in the Global Biodiversity Framework if you are at a global level, then the EU Nature Restoration Law, and then national and regional local plans”.
The consultancy boss said that credit mechanisms are not the be-all and end-all of financing nature restoration and that they may inherit a problematic legacy based on recent integrity challenges in the voluntary carbon market.
“We have to overcome the paradigm of compensating our emissions and being focused on our own backyard.”
The “own backyard” Leonardi relates to biodiversity offsetting, where historical nature compensation schemes have been targeted. He believes that private sector contributions are needed beyond this scale.
One of Etifor’s flagship projects is the public-private partnership BioClima, where they provide technical assistance to land management projects across the Lombardy region of Italy.
The activity is neither a biodiversity offsetting nor crediting project, but is providing certifiable improvements in biodiversity with interest from the private sector, the company contends.
The programme matched €3.5 mln in public grants, provided by the regional authority, with €1.5 mln in private sector finance for nature conservation and protection projects in the region.
BioClima uses the 2018 Forest Stewardship Council Ecosystem Service Procedure to certify a positive impact on biodiversity, water, and a number of other aspects of natural capital. Corporates that sponsor improvement works and enhance management are then able to make different levels of claim based on the standard.
Once impacts are certified, corporates are able to promote their financial sponsorship of verified ecosystem services based on certain criteria, but this is not tied to company performance under the standard and does not equate to a credit unit.
Drawing parallels with the carbon market, Leonardi proposed this financial sponsorship model of ecosystem services as an alternative to the credit approach, which can then contribute to regional and national targets.
“There is no rule that says if you want to compensate your emissions, you have to buy carbon credits, it’s like saying to travel to Milan you need to use a car … credits are just one business model that you can get to through different ways.”
Currently, the consultancy is using this approach across 12 regional parks in the Lombardy region including the Ticino Valley Park, Val di Mello Nature Reserve, and Adda Sud Regional Park.
Leonardi believes that the demand for the financial sponsorship of the ecosystem services approach, as demonstrated by BioClima, will come from corporates who are looking to minimise their residual impacts, once their materiality assessments are completed.
“We’re involved in several wetland restoration projects where we are creating wetlands to neutralise impacts on water, especially for water bottling companies … we have also started work with several companies to understand how we can provide verified, certified biodiversity impacts on the ground,” Leonardi told Carbon Pulse.
The company said it is also assessing the relevance of using the Plan Vivo PV-Nature standard for Italian projects, which closed its second round of public consultation in September.
Currently, there is no global governing body setting market rules for numerous emerging voluntary biodiversity credit approaches, so it’s not clear how these approaches currently fit with the Global Biodiversity Framework as well as national and subnational regulations.
By Tom Woolnough – tom@carbon-pulse.com
** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter **
