Julieth Serrano
Conserving, restoring and managing the world’s biodiversity is an immense and urgent challenge, with one of the main barriers being insufficient and competitive funding. One potential solution to help overcome this funding gap is the emerging biodiversity credits (biocredits) market, which if used to directly support locally led conservation action, and complement other existing mechanisms, could offer a long-term financing tool to support nature protection and recovery.
However, developing a robust and credible market which champions local conservation leadership, upholds human rights, and has a significant and positive impact on biodiversity, is a complex process. Some of the current tensions in that process revolve around determining what a biodiversity unit is, how much it is worth, and how biodiversity improvement or maintenance will be credibly measured.
These issues have raised important questions about who decides what biodiversity is important, what monitoring metrics and methods are credible, and what this means for conservation practice.