A group of academics have launched a community-focused standard for high-integrity carbon and biodiversity credits to address the growing demand for reliable markets, the team leader has told Carbon Pulse.

The framework, called Fair Credits Standard, was presented during the Second Annual Conference on Nature-based Solutions held in London recently, and is now in the process of exploring financial sources to get the initiative beyond the pre-seed stage.

Currently, the team is composed of six experts from various universities in the UK, Germany, and the US, aiming to involve local people in the assessment phases.

The goal is to promote a reliable and independent verification process for project developers among rich and poorer countries, Julian Clifton, senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln and leader of the initiative, told Carbon Pulse.

“I wanted to design a rigorous framework to evaluate how carbon, biodiversity, and carbon plus biodiversity credit schemes propose to deliver benefits to rights holders, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities,” he said.

“To date, I believe there is no underpinning framework for the community benefits, which I think are essential for the market’s credibility.”

Clifton said the group plans to trial the standard with a carbon scheme developer in East Africa while also exploring opportunities in Scotland, where rewilding projects are gaining momentum.

“We expect our pipeline of projects to be steady enough next year,” he said.

FIVE PILLARS

The Fair Credit Standard involves five scientific principles that will be used to verify the claims that developers make, addressing:

• Right holders
• Land tenures
• Participation
• Payment modalities
• Monitoring and enforcement

Each principle has specific criteria beneath them, Clifton said, including the implementation of free, prior, and informed consent – a mechanism that implicates the consultations of Indigenous populations before starting a project on ancestral land or using their resources.

As for the land tenure, the scheme aims to assess the actual context of tenure over the past 25 years, including ongoing claims or past conflicts over property rights.

The participation principle focused on demonstrating that all individuals are eligible, able, and willing to participate in the project, Clifton said, adding that developers must also prove it generates positive effects on well-being.

To get the high-integrity certification, developers should also provide details of the payment modalities, reporting on the revenues of credit sales going to the community, as well as on the timing and delivery.

“We’ll ask the developer to clearly indicate what proportion of money is going where, when, and why,” Clifton said.

“The independent verification will require extra efforts for them, but the last thing they want nowadays is to be associated with a bad scheme.”

INDIGENOUS, LOCAL FOCUS

Standard setters have been rewarded as one of the key players in the nascent biodiversity credit markets, as issues linked to credibility have significantly hit the carbon space.

In its second report released in April, the UN-backed Biodiversity Credit Alliance (BCA) stated that building a transparent and rigorous assessment process for credit standards and methodologies is a crucial step.

For instance, guaranteeing free, prior, and informed consent is among the priorities of Indigenous Peoples, as they included it in a set of recommendations for the market players released earlier this year by the BCA’s Indigenous panel.

“In the long run, poorer schemes will fail, but they will drag others down in the process because no one will know who to trust anymore,” Clifton said.

“That’s why it is essential to provide a reliable and independent community-focused framework to verify developers’ claims.”

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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