Establishing a biodiversity credit market for marine ecosystems is much more challenging than setting one up for land-based environments, as ownership and measurement issues are hampering its development, the head of a non-profit has said.

More data is needed before metrics and methodologies for a marine biodiversity credit scheme can be considered, according to Samantha Deane, founding director at Kelp Forest Foundation (KFF), a Netherlands-based non-profit charity.

“There is still a lack of transparency knowledge standards around the whole process,” she said. “Much pre-work still needs to be done in parallel or before you start considering selling or creating any biodiversity credits.”

The data obstacle is a key reason why there has been less research completed on marine credits recently, compared to land-based ones.

Julian Clifton, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Lincoln and expert in marine conservation, said there are several reasons why problems may be more acute in marine contexts, mostly related to resource ownership.

The sale of terrestrial biodiversity credits can be allocated to relevant individuals or groups who can demonstrate a form of ownership of the relevant site, Clifton said.

“In a marine context, there is more often a multitude of competing claimants who can justify stewardship or use rights, and this is further complicated by claims to different vertical elements (seabed, water column) of a water body,” he said.

Furthermore, there are often inconsistencies in the extent of jurisdiction by government authorities within a country over the nearshore and intertidal area, leading to competing claims and assertions of rights, he noted.

“This may delay scheme implementation, create local division, or reduce scheme viability, all of which will reduce the rate of investment, technological innovation, and practical experimentation of marine biodiversity credit schemes.”

REVENUES

The ownership issues could result in complications in identifying who will receive the revenues from conservation actions in marine biodiversity credit schemes.

In the case of seagrass planting or giant kelp cultivation, both species are physically attached to the seabed, and “leasing areas for their cultivation similar to that carried out for other seabed resource uses would be a logical route”, Clifton said.

“It is less likely that there would be other claimants to seabed resources in these cases, with ownership of offshore seabeds often vested in the national government,” he added.

“Therefore, any revenues from biodiversity credit sales would accrue to the investor responsible for the cultivation. There would need to be exclusive use rights associated with these leasing agreements, as clearly other activities such as fishing could negatively impact the value of these investments.”

The scheme operator should return a percentage of its profits to nearby communities in a bid to generate support for the scheme, he said.

“Investing such funds in community-level facilities or initiatives that affect all residents would again be advisable, to ensure that local elites do not benefit disproportionately,” he said.

METHODOLOGY CHALLENGES

“All these issues must be addressed before making any other move,” KFF’s Deane said.

In the last few months, attention has grown around water-based credits, with several initiatives launched by different companies.

Purina Europe, for instance, has recently partnered with Netherlands-based Oyster Heaven, a startup aiming to produce voluntary marine biodiversity credits from a pilot by creating oyster reefs off the UK coast.

In a separate effort, California-based non-profit OpenEarth launched a methodology to try to enable governments to generate marine biodiversity credits from protected areas in December. The framework aimed to capture marine biodiversity’s ecological and social value, with one unit reflecting one square kilometre of protected ocean over one year.

KFF is not involved in developing a standard or a methodology, as it prefers to focus on preliminary collecting data on kelp forests to measure impact and biodiversity health. It addresses the gap in science and knowledge around kelp forests’ ecosystem services, and raises awareness of their economic and ecological importance.

“We are creating the baselines and studying how you can prove that you’re actually generating a biodiversity gain,” Deane explained.

The foundation uses environmental DNA (eDNA) for its marine afforestation projects, a technology that allows scientists to detect and identify species in their natural habitats by analysing DNA samples from the environment.

“We have done some study on the wildest and most pristine kelp forests using cutting-edge technology, and we are starting to get a sense of what a healthy marine ecosystem looks like,” said Deane.

KFF has used eDNA together with other techniques – including diver photos and videos, acoustics, visual counting, and quadrants – in its research in the Falkland Islands and Namibia, where it studies cultivated kelp forests compared to pristine ones.

“This allows us to understand what types of organisms usually live in a very healthy kelp forest and establish a metric of healthy biodiversity,” Deane said.

According to the University of Lincoln’s Clifton, monitoring biodiversity in marine environments is “clearly” more problematic than monitoring it on land, since scientific knowledge of intra-species and intra-habitat relationships is more limited.

This issue can also add to greater uncertainty regarding the additionality of marine biodiversity credit schemes, a genuine positive change that would not happen otherwise.

The conservation of marine ecosystems is one of the main goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to preserve at least 30% of land and seas by 2030. Less than 3% of marine and water bodies are considered marine protected areas (MPAs), according to the Marine Conservation Institute.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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