The BIRA Coalition is forming a buyers’ club that aims to raise millions of dollars through nature credits generated by large-scale projects in Sub-Saharan African countries, Carbon Pulse has learned.

The club aims to identify financiers from philanthropic, corporate, financial, and development sectors for projects that generate biodiversity or carbon gains, Biodiversity Investments – Researcher & Accelerator (BIRA) said.

BIRA hopes to launch the Buyers’ Club by Mar. 2025 for an initial period of one year.

In 2023, a group of organisations launched BIRA to attract investment in high-quality biodiversity projects across Africa. It includes CreditNature, ValueNature, African Leadership University School of Wildlife Conservation, consultancy Axum, and investment data platform Xilva.

“We have a pipeline across the region, but final project selection, and hence size and country selection, will be dependent on the interest of buyers,” Syakaa William, nature-based solutions lead at Axum, told Carbon Pulse.

“Nevertheless, we expect to raise millions across members of the buyers’ club across five to 10 projects in the next year,” William said.

BIRA has started engagement with both corporate and philanthropic buyers, but is eager to speak with more potential clients.

The coalition is not the first organisation to have spearheaded a group-buying process as a way of trying to stimulate demand for the emerging biodiversity credits market.

A year ago, the World Economic Forum said it was putting together a buyers club for biodiversity credits. In July, credit developer RePlanet said it was seeking to sell $14 mln worth of credits to multiple-buyer groups. Neither initiative has yet announced any transactions.

“There is a lot of uncertainty and concerns around biodiversity credits and the market is still nascent. Our initiative in contrast focuses on nature certificates and stacked carbon credits with a small group of market makers,” said William.

CREDITNATURE CORE

The club will leverage CreditNature’s Nature Investment Certificates (NICs) method for developing credits as its core component, but it will also work to integrate projects using other credible methodologies upon confirmation of buyer interest, William said.

It is also flexible on the methodology used for any carbon credits stacked alongside the nature units. Stacked products are sold from the same area of land under separate transactions.

When the coalition launched, it said it was offering African projects a science-based approach to measuring ecosystem integrity using CreditNature’s Natural Asset Recovery Investment Analytics (NARIA) framework. NARIA can be used to underpin nature or biodiversity credits.

Projects will seek to align with the principles currently being developed by the World Economic Forum, Biodiversity Credit Alliance, and International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, BIRA said.

“The BIRA buyers’ club offers an opportunity for corporate investors to engage with nature-positive projects that meet their corporate social responsibility needs,” said Cain Blythe, CEO of CreditNature.

Last month, Tanzania-based developer Kijani Pamoja – The Kilimanjaro Project partnered with CreditNature with the aim of launching a nature credit pilot in Tanzania by the end of November. Supported by BIRA, the initiative aims to restore more than 2,000 hectares of degraded land in Kahe Ward, Tanzania.

CreditNature has won a contract from the Scottish government to establish a market for private biodiversity investment, with its first credits set to issue from the country using the NARIA framework.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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