Two of the participants in the emerging biodiversity credit market are partnering to align their work with the aim of scaling nature markets in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Carbon Pulse has learned.
CreditNature and ValueNature will pool their expertise to streamline their credit products by collaborating on nature uplift methodology, measuring reporting and verification, and project development.
“The collaboration marks a significant step forward, consolidating opportunities for investment in nature restoration at scale,” Cain Blythe, CEO Of CreditNature, told Carbon Pulse.
CreditNature will launch an ‘ecosystem restoration code’ later this year to facilitate quicker onboarding of projects internationally, in partnership with ValueNature, Blythe said.
The move comes as a plethora of new actors have entered the biodiversity field over the past two years with a multitude of approaches.
“By aligning around a single approach we help to alleviate some of the complexity with so many entities working on their own standards and methodologies,” said Simon Morgan, CEO of ValueNature.
“We are aligning our thinking around the various tools we have under development, and presenting a united nature investment framework and crediting process.”
SHARED METHODOLOGY
Both companies will use CreditNature’s ecosystem restoration methodology, which received independent accreditation in April, with the aim of extending its use beyond the UK and Europe
The two organisations will develop “conservation impact credits” using the methodology. In April, CreditNature said the method would be used for “nature credits”.
England-based nature fintech company CreditNature has won a contract from the Scottish government to establish a market for private biodiversity investment, where most of its pilots are located.
“The pilot projects we are launching in Africa and the Americas will enable us to extend the accreditation to these regions,” Blythe said.
South Africa-headquartered ValueNature is working on nature crediting pilots with Plan Vivo in Uganda and Verra in Zambia and South Africa.
“ValueNature and CreditNature both have their own network and pipeline of land supply, as well as investors and corporate partners interested in this space,” said Blythe.
The ecosystem restoration method, part of CreditNature’s Natural Asset Recovery Investment Analytics (NARIA) framework, will be used to baseline, forecast and validate changes in ecosystem condition on a range of landholdings to generate nature credits, CreditNature said in April.
Underpinned by Accounting for Nature’s key metric, Econd – used by several other accredited methodologies – CreditNature’s method scores ecosystems from zero, meaning fully degraded, to 100, the best possible state.
The two companies will also seek to include carbon offsets in nature crediting methodologies, the companies said. They have 1.1 million hectares and 350,000 ha, respectively, dedicated to voluntary biodiversity credits globally.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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