Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) issued to a project in Western Australia will be stapled to independently verified ‘co-benefit units’ tokenised on blockchain, according to its developers.

Corporate Carbon and non-profit Forever Wild Group have teamed up with tech company Beimpact to attach ‘co-benefit units’ to 28,600 ACCUs being issued to the Narndee and Boodanoo human-induced regeneration (HIR) project, they announced Wednesday.

The co-benefit units relate to actions to protect the Mallee Fowl, a nationally vulnerable species, and to undertake comprehensive biodiversity management assessments across a vast area that remains largely undocumented, they said.

“To date the market has been flooded with vague co-benefit claims that often only represent the intrinsic benefits of the carbon project,” Forever Wild Group CEO Fiachra Kearny said.

“With this new framework we can not only bring high integrity credits to market but also give financiers and investors the confidence to invest in a sustainable future for the agricultural industry.”

Fiachra told Carbon Pulse Tuesday that one ‘co-benefit unit’ would be attached to every ACCU issued, and that he expected these ACCUs to generate a A$12 price premium – around 35% – compared to HIR ACCUs, which traded Tuesday afternoon at A$32.50.

According to the companies, the Beimpact framework represent verifiable environmental actions that are fully traceable and transparent, ensuring any premium paid is tied to demonstrable and additional on-ground impact.

These co-benefits are unitised on a blockchain registry, where buyers, project developers, and beneficiaries all have visibility on the direct costs of the management interventions that achieve additional environmental outcomes.

Once the related ecological intervention has been performed, those co-benefit units are retired.

Any future purchase of co-benefit units for the same property would be additional and fund new management activities not possible without this funding, the announcement said.

“The unit is made up of registries, so there can be one or more registries inside the unit, and the registries reflect a set of management actions that are adopted or taken with the project,” Kearny said.

“Those management actions basically reflect additionality and a series of actions for biodiversity and threatened species. So we break down those management actions, we cost them out, we build a registry, and that becomes a unit that gets stapled to the carbon credit.”

It noted the release of the stapled ACCUs could pave the way for more verifiable, high integrity co-benefits to be associated with ACCUs ahead of the incoming Nature Repair Market, and this method could dovetail into a number of global standards, natural capital supply chain accounting, and can be independently audited.

Beimpact uses the IP and trading platform of Everclime, a Perth-based company that houses a variety of “impact certificates” available for purchase.

The number of financial instruments associated with carbon credits being developed by Australian companies is rising as the industry grows, with a Sydney-based trading house recently beginning to offer insurance-wrapped voluntary credits on its platform.

The Narndee and Boodanoo project was funded by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which supplied cash upfront in exchange for a portion of the ACCUs to be produced by the project, in what was considered a novel transaction at the time, but has become increasingly popular.

The A$1.7 mln transaction helped Forever Wild acquire and manage pastoral leases for the project area, with Corporate Carbon providing the technical services to support the project.

“The Narndee and Boodanoo project is a strong example of cattle and carbon working alongside each other to provide additional environmental outcomes that are now fully verifiable, working to support a profitable and viable agricultural economy,” Corporate Carbon CEO Gary Wyatt said.

The project was first registered in 2018 and has been issued nearly 91,000 ACCUs over its life, according to data from the Clean Energy Regulator.

By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com