An environmental consultancy is helping a client prepare to generate biodiversity credits from a 2,000-hectare estate in the Scottish highlands, in collaboration with RePlanet.
London-based SLR Consulting has designed the biodiversity credits for the unnamed Scottish estate, in one of the first examples of a UK-based initiative using the Wallacea Trust’s methodology.
“We’ve been working with SLR for a few years on an advisory level. They were quite ahead of the curve,” said Max Bodmer, biodiversity project manager at credit developer RePlanet.
SLR “ran with” Wallacea Trust’s open-source biodiversity credits methodology, Bodmer told Carbon Pulse.
UK-based non-profit Wallacea Trust launched a third version of its methodology for measuring uplift in biodiversity credits last October. The organisation 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.
In Scotland, collecting the data for the baseline biodiversity, from which uplift can be shown, is nearing completion, SLR said in a press release.
The project’s credits will be independently peer reviewed via the Biodiversity Future Initiative (BFI) this year to begin to verify their claims, as part of the Wallacea Trust methodology.
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.
A stage one review, which takes three weeks, costs £2,000. The second stage costs an additional £5,000, BFI said.
The Scottish estate has not made any major conservation efforts so far as it is still collecting baseline data, Bodmer added.
“There’s going to be peatland management. They’re going to be doing quite a lot of natural regeneration. They’re quite innovative, they want to be testing out as many different routes to monetising natural capital as they possibly can.”
“For a UK landscape it’s a relatively biodiverse area, it’s complex in terms of its habitat composition so it’s going to be good for biodiversity.”
The estate is gathering data over its whole area including areas it is using for commercial afforestation, where biodiversity loss is expected, to avoid any risk of greenwashing through selective monitoring, SLR said.
Metrics selected for its biodiversity credits cover the main components of the food chain including decomposers, plants, herbivores, and carnivores.
“The taxonomic units chosen for each metric, e.g. breeding birds, all have a large number of species with potential to respond to changes in habitat type and quality,” SLR said.
“This is important for a calculation approach based on the number and abundance of species and their conservation value.”
Wallacea Trust’s framework is one of several approaches to measuring biodiversity improvements for crediting emerging from companies including Verra, Terrasos, and Plan Vivo.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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