A UK-based project developer is workshopping a ‘living rivers index’, scoring the biodiversity value of stretches of waterways to help lay the way for freshwater credits.

The index has no launch date yet, but CreditNature would like to release it “as soon as possible”, Barney Bedford, senior geospatial analyst at Credit Nature, told a webinar this week.

Three metric groups on rivers could be gathered into a single figure, published on the living rivers index, to underpin freshwater credits, Bedford said.

Owners of areas of rivers who want to generate credits will be able to use the index to show ecological health improvements over time to potential investor or corporate buyers.

“The index has come around because of the need to combine relative baseline scores of different parts of the ecosystem, processes that interrelate, bringing those together into a single number,” he said in response to a question from Carbon Pulse.

CreditNature is in the process of developing a platform for biodiversity credits in Scotland, backed by the government, known as Nature Impact Tokens.

These will be based on its Natural Asset Recovery Investment Analytics (NARIA) framework, which it launched in August. The new  index is an effort to develop freshwater metrics within that framework.

Land-based Nature Impact Token issuances from CreditNature will be underpinned by its Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII). Some of the freshwater metrics could feed into the EII, Bedford said.

Biodiversity is notoriously harder to measure in water than on land. However, recent efforts to measure aquatic biodiversity have been ramping up, with the UK government taking steps towards developing a marine net gain metric to accompany its mandatory terrestrial equivalent.

THE METRICS

CreditNature is looking to move beyond the land-based metrics in its NARIA framework to introduce river indicators it can ultimately extend to the marine space, according to Bedford.

The score in the index would treat all sub-metrics equally.

“Part of the challenge is making sure that each metric is individually relevant, and there’s not a huge overlap between the metrics,” he said.

CreditNature is not yet sure what one river credit would equal – whether it would be linked to hectarage, like its land-based Nature Impact Tokens.

The metrics would be divided into three groups: river dynamics, water retention, and bank vegetation:

Source: CreditNature

Ideally, metrics will enable consistent, reliable results with less frequent monitoring, Bedford said.

“They need to be scalable and affordable. We would like everything to be remote sensing based if it’s possible to actually get down to the level of detail that we need. But obviously that’s not always possible.”

Examples of sources the index could use include:

• Catchment Area-based Fragmentation Index –  impacts of man-made structures like dams
• European Space Agency’s satellite Sentinel-1
• Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)

“All the main pieces are there, at least in demonstration level at the moment, so really it’s getting all the key players together and making sure that everything can be put across in a regulatory compliant way,” Bedford said.

CreditNature is working on creating pilots in Scotland that can demonstrate how the river metrics could work in practice. It is already participating in a restoration initiative in the Dreel Burn river area by the coastal town of Anstruther.

In November, the company said it had a pre-seed valuation of almost £5 million ($6.3 mln).

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

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