UK-headquartered non-profit Wallacea Trust has updated its methodology for measuring uplift in biodiversity credits with the inclusion of a peer review process to verify claims.
Biodiversity gains should be validated through an independent academic peer review process, via the Biodiversity Futures Initiative (BFI), Wallacea said in Version 3 of its Methodology for Quantifying Units of Biodiversity Gain.
The methodology is the “first” measuring framework for biodiversity credits to include a peer review process, according to Tim Coles, founder of Wallacea Trust’s sister research company Operation Wallacea.
The buyer of a biodiversity credit is “far less likely to buy” if the unit has not been independently verified, Coles told Carbon Pulse.
UK-based BFI has a two-stage process. First, a panel of eight academics examines whether to approve a project based on its methods and the selected metrics to measure biodiversity. Second, the initiative analyses project data continuously through the project lifecycle, it said last month.
A stage one review, which takes three weeks, costs £2,000. The second stage costs an additional £5,000, BFI said.
However, the issuing of the first biodiversity credits using the Wallacea Trust methodology is a “couple of years” away, Coles predicted.
“We’ve got two projects going through a stage two [BFI] review. They still won’t be issued until there’s been time so the biodiversity has accumulated, or in those cases not been lost.” Wallacea Trust defines a credit as a 1% uplift, or avoided loss, in biodiversity per hectare using a ‘basket of metrics’, which vary based on habitat type and location.
The framework is one of several approaches to measuring biodiversity improvements for crediting emerging from companies including Verra, Terrasos, and Plan Vivo.
GLOBAL UPLIFT
The update to Version 3 of Wallacea Trust’s methodology followed analysis of data from three key projects in the UK, Honduras, and Romania, Coles said.
In the UK, conservation company Nattergal has been trying to rewild farmland in Boothby, Lincolnshire.
Furthermore, updates came from “lots of people around the world using the methodology – wetlands in Spain, regenerative farms in Egypt, a Scottish island”, Coles said.
“We give advice to them free of charge, basically to get them started. They come and give us lots different ideas. All of that information was incorporated into the new version.”
Buyers have said they will buy around five million biodiversity credits from projects globally, Coles said, a figure that has remained approximately the same since he first mentioned it a year ago. He is also CEO of Replanet, which creates projects that aim to generate biodiversity and carbon credits.
However, finding projects that are viable for generating biodiversity credits is a “much bigger problem” than funding, he said.
“We are finding willing buyers. There are corporates but the vast majority are impact funds.”
OTHER CHANGES
The Wallacea Trust also made changes to areas of its methodology such as its abundance score calculation, and proceeding without a reference site.
In addition, changes affected:
- The list of definitions
- The guidance for ‘importance scores’ calculation
- Abundance score calculations
- How to apply a structural metric
- Uncertainty adjustments
- Calculating areas of avoided loss
- Guidance on how to deal with leakage
- Guidance to calculate awardable biodiversity credits
- External independent academic peer review to verify biodiversity claims
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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