New Web Hosting Pioneer Emerges, Offering Affordable Hosting Solutions Coupled with…There’s a new emerging innovative finance scheme to support biodiversity conservation: voluntary biodiversity credits. These are meant to be purely voluntary, “positive investment” in nature by the private sector and, in theory, should not be used to offset damage elsewhere.
However, several Indigenous and environmental groups and researchers are worried that, like carbon credits, biodiversity credits will become yet another way for companies and governments to continue business as usual. On paper, the concept sounds enticing. But not everyone thinks the distinction between credits and offsets will hold true on the ground. “In reality, if we reflect on what’s happening in the carbon market, nobody’s giving money just to pay for carbon credit,” says Joan Carling, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights International . “The market is really meant for offset in practice.”
“I think you have to ask the fundamental question of why a company would buy biodiversity credits?” says Opel. “If they can’t claim it as an offset, what are they buying? If they’re going to make limited claims, and say that we’ve made this contribution, then they can just put it into their philanthropy bucket. And our point is, you don’t need to buy credits to make that philanthropic contribution.
For decades, researchers and economists have tried and failed to come up with a universal measure of nature. Moreover, the way scientists,and businesses value plants and animals or an ecosystem can differ vastly from how communities view them. Placing a monetary value can also be morally problematic for certain communities. “We see our territories as our mother that can provide us with anything,” says Monica Ndoen, an activist from Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance, AMAN.
“What we’ve been asking for is that our lands and territories are in our hands, and that we’re allowed to govern it the way we want to govern it,” adds Carling. The idea is that many Indigenous communities rely on certain species to check on the health of their intact or threatened ecosystems. For some communities in the Colombian Amazon, for example, that indicator species is the jaguar. “For us, the jaguar is magical,” says Flores. “So, the species has been selected, one, because the scientific community has found it to be an indicator of healthy ecosystems; but the animal is also important from our cultural perspective.
“The reason we do this is because the communities are constantly getting approached by mining and logging companies, and for some community members, that’s easy money,” says Burbank.