Environmental accounting non-profit Accounting for Nature (AFN) has unveiled plans to launch a separate commercial entity which will draw from its environmental measurement standards to develop natural assets.
Speaking at the Climate Investor Forum in Melbourne on Wednesday, AFN CEO Adrian Ward spoke of plans to launch the company’s business venture, Nxt Nature Asset Solutions soon.
Ward spoke of the overarching issue in emerging biodiversity markets of participants struggling to figure out how to make efforts to protect and restore nature profitable.
“As a non-profit, science-based organisation, that’s not really our role to do that, but we were waiting for quite some time for someone to fill that gap, and I have a few board members … who got a bit impatient,” he said.
Ward said Nxt would take the rigour of AFN’s environmental standards, and would administer and commercialise environmental accounts, emphasising it would be separate “in all aspects” from AFN.
“We’ve had some significant governance and institutional arrangements to think through.”
“There’ll be more information coming soon and we have a number of product launches coming up,” Ward added.
A website associated with Nxt said the commercial venture would redefine how nature’s value is understood and leveraged – bridging science, investment, and impact.
“A new era of nature markets is coming,” the website said.
The company will connect “nature assets to trusted scientifically robust solutions that measure impact for nature”, the website added.
Until now, Australia-based AFN has been focussed on accrediting and verifying credible and transparent state-of-nature measures, with the goal of enabling landholders, investors, and governments to make informed decisions that contribute to improve biodiversity worldwide.
Additionally, AFN late last year was tapped to take over the administration of the NaturePlus biodiversity crediting scheme from project developer GreenCollar, and is in the process of building a digital registry for the scheme.
Ward said AFN currently had around 81 active environmental accounting projects that were growing steadily, estimating it would have over 100 accounts in Australia and the UK, covering some 10 million hectares.
The non-profit, launched in 2019, has accredited 23 scientific methods, according to its website.
Ward added that by accrediting scientific methods brought to it by its clients, those clients could then help scale the emerging biodiversity market.
“We’re really just trying to get people to measure stuff in a consistent, transparent comparable way,” he said.
“A lot of our clients really want to monetise, in their own way, the output of that.”
By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com
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