Assigning economic value to biodiversity: the promise and perils of biodiversity credits

英国、欧盟和世界其他地区目前和最近的立法正在对许多类型的组织提出更高的要求，要求它们报告其活动对碳和自然的影响。私营部门对自然保护的兴趣也迅速增加，将其作为企业社会责任(CSR)的一部分，进行积极的宣传，并普遍“做正确的事情”。这些趋势，加上正在制定的各种自然资本影响评估计划，几乎肯定会在未来两年内产生对生物多样性信用的大量需求。生物多样性信用与碳信用一样，为生物多样性分配可投资和可交易的经济价值，例如，允许土地所有者筹集资金(基于预测的生物多样性改善)，为其土地上的自然保护提供资金。保护私人投资联盟的2021年保护金融报告显示，私营部门的资金增长非常迅速：从2016年的20亿美元增加到2020年的180亿美元。值得注意的是，这份报告得出的结论是，增长率可能会高得多，但由于缺乏量化生物多样性的适当方法，增长速度受到了阻碍。据我们所知，这一对生物多样性经济学至关重要、发展迅速的主题尚未成为试图综合的主题。因此，我们的总体目标是提供现有方法的综合，以量化生物多样性，以便潜在地用于生物多样性的评估和交易。我们与一组利益相关者(由该项目的顾问领导)共同设计了拟议的研究，该小组目前正在制定生物多样性信用标准。我们的利益攸关方小组在一系列在线研讨会上举行了会议，另一次会议定于2021年晚些时候举行。他们确认迫切需要对生物多样性的量化方法进行全面和严格的审查，以便可能用于生物多样性的评估和交易；目前尚不存在这种审查。我们的主要目标是通过对文献和其他材料的全面综合，及时填补这一空白，将关键发现传达给相关受众(超越期刊读者)。审查将包括目前如何量化人类活动对生物多样性的影响，以及可交易生物多样性信用在实现世界各地生物多样性净收益方面的作用。因此，我们建议制定严格的学术基础，以便能够建立一种合理的方法来量化生物多样性的得失，供那些不是生物多样性科学家但正在与生物多样性信用合作并对其进行认证的人(例如投资者、监管机构、经济学家)使用。另一方面，我们发现生物多样性专家在参与生物多样性信用概念方面保持了强烈的沉默。然而，如上所述，这样的信贷计划已经在制定中。我们认为，迫切需要更多的生物多样性科学家与经济学家合作，制定生物多样性信贷计划，以确保这些计划符合目标。为了促进这一点，我们将针对生物多样性科学家的读者，对生物多样性信贷计划的优点和潜在危险进行评估。为了实现这些目标，我们将聘请一名研究助理3个月，对学术和灰色文献进行系统的、可重复的搜索，以汇编我们的证据库，并帮助我们进行综合。项目团队将在项目开始时与我们利益相关者小组中的主要参与者在线(免费)会面，向他们介绍研究助理，分享最新发展的细节，并最终敲定文献搜索过程的细节。该项目将以一个虚拟研讨会结束，将结果反馈给利益攸关方小组。

Current and recent legislation in the UK, EU and elsewhere in the world is introducing greater requirements for organisations of many types to report about the effects of their activities on both carbon and nature. There is also rapidly increasing interest in the private sector in nature conservation as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR), positive publicity and generally 'doing the right thing'. These trends, along with various natural capital impact assessment schemes being developed, are almost certain to create a large demand for biodiversity credits within the next two years. Biodiversity credits, as with carbon credits, assign investable and tradeable economic value to biodiversity, for example allowing a landowner to raise finance (based on forecast biodiversity improvement) to fund nature conservation on her land. The 2021 Conservation Finance report of the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation shows a very rapid growth in private sector funding: from US$2 billion in 2016 to $18 billion in 2020. Remarkably, this report concludes that the rate of growth could be considerably higher, but is being held back by the lack of appropriate methods for quantifying biodiversity. This crucial, rapidly developing topic that is fundamental to the economics of biodiversity has, to our knowledge, not yet been the subject of an attempt at synthesis. Our overarching aim is therefore to provide a synthesis of existing methods to quantify biodiversity for potential use in biodiversity valuation and trading.We have co-designed the proposed research with a group of stakeholders (led by the project's Consultant) that is currently developing a biodiversity credit standard. Our stakeholder group has met in a series of online workshops, with another scheduled later in 2021. They have identified an urgent need for a comprehensive and rigorous review of methods to quantify biodiversity for potential use in biodiversity valuation and trading; this currently does not exist. Our main aim is to fill this gap, in a timely manner, via a thorough synthesis of the literature, and other materials to communicate the key findings to relevant audiences (beyond journal readership). The review will include how impacts of human activities on biodiversity are currently being quantified, and the role of tradeable biodiversity credits in achieving biodiversity net gain around the world. Thus, we propose to produce rigorous academic underpinning to enable a sound methodology for quantifying biodiversity gain or loss, for use by people who are not biodiversity scientists but are working with, and certifying, biodiversity credits (e.g. investors, regulators, economists).On the flip side, we have found strong reticence among biodiversity experts to engage with the concept of biodiversity credits. Yet, as outlined above, such credit schemes are already being developed. We argue that there is an urgent need for more biodiversity scientists to engage with economists to develop biodiversity credit schemes, to ensure they are fit for purpose. To stimulate this, we will provide an assessment of the merits and potential dangers of biodiversity credit schemes, targeting a readership of biodiversity scientists. This will be in the form of a short, punchy opinion or perspective-style piece in a high-profile journal.To achieve these aims, we will employ a research assistant for 3 months, to do systematic, repeatable searches of academic and 'grey' literature, to compile our evidence base and help with our synthesis. The project team will meet online (no cost) with key players in our stakeholder group at the start of the project, to introduce the research assistant to them, share details on the latest developments and finalise the details of the literature searching process. The project will conclude with a virtual workshop to feed the results back to the stakeholder group.