The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is exploring forward selling biodiversity credits from its world heritage sites, according to carbon credit platform CYNK.

The UN agency has partnered with Nairobi-headquartered CYNK, and US-based ecosystem services firm Regenerative Resources, on a pilot project to forward sell credits from a site in Mexico, according to CYNK’s CEO, Sudhu Arumugam.

They aim to forward sell a UNESCO-branded biodiversity credit in January next year, from the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, to pay for ecological restoration, Arumugam said, confirming details in a Bloomberg Law article.

Forward selling is where the buyer invests in a credit before it is verified for market to support the project.

The incentive for buyers will be more social impact than financial gains, Arumugam told Carbon Pulse.

“What we’re hearing from buyers in Europe and in the US is that social impact is now the number one ESG metric,” he said.

The project aims to restore “thousands of hectares” of mangroves and seagrass, boosting fish stocks and local employment.

“The project is in one of UNESCO’s flagship sites. Fish stocks have been depleted through overfishing, and mangroves are no longer naturally propagating due to a combination of changing temperatures, increased erosion and sea grass degradation.”

Interest in the fledgling voluntary biodiversity credit market is growing quickly, but has yet to translate into many actual trades despite standards and pilots emerging over the past year.

The UNESCO partnership has targeted the leveraging of local knowledge and skills to protect biodiversity, create social impact, and develop sustainable economic models.

World heritage sites encompass a fifth of mapped global species richness globally, while only covering 1% of the world’s surface, according to UNESCO.

In April, the UN Environment Programme urged finance to invest in biodiversity credits in a report.

The UN Development Programme, and International Institute for Environment and Development, launched the Biodiversity Credit Alliance last December to explore how voluntary credits could work globally.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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