Developing a new co-designed decision support tool for biodiversity credits and investment

该项目将与工业和第三部门合作伙伴合作，支持世界上第一个生物多样性信用标准（即生物多样性项目必须满足的核心环境，社会和治理要求，以获得认证）的发展。英国，欧盟和其他地方最近和即将出台的立法正在对许多类型的组织提出更高的要求，以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在迅速增加，将其作为企业社会责任、积极宣传等的一部分。这些趋势，加上正在制定的各种自然资本影响评估计划，正在创造对生物多样性信用的大量需求，但目前还没有生物多样性信用标准。与碳信用额类似，生物多样性信用额为生物多样性赋予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提升），以资助其土地上的自然保护。该项目与多个利益相关者共同设计了生物多样性信用工具（BCT）。它的核心是两个慈善机构（Wallacea信托基金-保护; Plan Vivo -标准和认证）之间的伙伴关系，这两个机构签署了一项谅解备忘录，以制定生物多样性信贷标准，并已收到大量利息（见受益人）。项目PI是生物多样性可持续发展方法工作组（自2021年中期开始举行会议）的成员，并被选为2022年开始的生物多样性标准工作组（BSWG）的唯一学术机构，并担任即将到来的技术咨询委员会（TAC）主席。目前关于环境竞赛中标准制定和简化挑战的学术文献往往是回顾性的。该项目提供了一个难得的机会，观察在实践中科学和不同利益相关者的目标之间出现的紧张局势和模棱两可。保护私人投资联盟（Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation）的《2021年保护融资报告》显示，私营部门的生物多样性资金增长非常迅速：从2016年的20亿美元增长到2020年的180亿美元。值得注意的是，该报告的结论是，增长率可能会高得多，但由于缺乏适当的生物多样性量化方法而受到阻碍。我们目前的NERC-ESRC项目旨在提供一种综合方法来量化生物多样性，以用于生物多样性评估和交易。该综合报告为项目合作伙伴Plan Vivo正在制定的生物多样性标准方法提供了信息。我们建议的项目的一个关键部分是对生物多样性量化的候选方案进行严格的实地测试。一旦标准发布，我们将与利益相关者合作改进它，并开发实施它的工具。利益相关者已经制作了申请生物多样性信用的早期文件草案，并邀请了众多感兴趣的组织中的10个使用它进行试点应用。这些试点项目（来自5大洲的8个国家;见跟踪记录）将反复处理，从经验中学习，并从我们的利益相关者和实地研究中学习，以在全面推出之前改进标准及其工作流程。为信用标准提出的生物多样性量化方法需要实地采样，并为项目申请人提供大量成本（反映了衡量生物多样性以进行经济评估的难度）。因此，在项目的后期阶段，一旦开发出该方法，我们的目标是开发工具，以帮助选择最合适的生物多样性提升项目的地点。总体而言，我们的项目代表了基本学术问题的协同作用，作为实现由业主领导的具有高预期影响的倡议的一部分。

Working with industrial and third sector partners, this project will support the development of the world's first biodiversity credit standard (i.e. core environmental, social and governance requirements biodiversity projects must meet to become certified).Recent and upcoming legislation in the UK, EU and elsewhere is introducing greater requirements for organisations of many types to report on the effects of their activities on both carbon and nature. There is also rapidly increasing private-sector interest in nature conservation as part of corporate social responsibility, positive publicity, etc. These trends, plus various natural capital impact assessment schemes being developed, are creating a large demand for biodiversity credits, but no biodiversity credit standard exists yet. Analogous to carbon credits, biodiversity credits assign investable and tradeable economic value to biodiversity, for example allowing a landowner to raise finance (based on forecast biodiversity uplift) to fund nature conservation on their land.This project co-designs a Biodiversity Credit Tool (BCT) with multiple stakeholders. It centres on a partnership between two charities (Wallacea Trust - conservation; Plan Vivo - standards and certification) that have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop a biodiversity credit standard, and have already received a large amount of interest (see Beneficiaries). The project PI is in the Biodiversity Uplift Methodology Working Group (meeting since mid-2021) and has been selected as the only academic on the Biodiversity Standard Working Group (BSWG), starting in 2022, and also to Chair the upcoming Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The current academic literature on standards development and commensuration challenges in environmental contests tends to be retrospective. This project provides a rare opportunity to observe tensions and equivocality emerging between scientific and different stakeholders goals in practice. This will improve understanding of decision making in biodiversity economics.The Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation's 2021 Conservation Finance report shows very rapid growth in private-sector biodiversity funding: from US$2 billion in 2016 to $18 billion in 2020. Remarkably, the report concludes that the growth rate could be considerably higher, but is held back by lack of appropriate methods for quantifying biodiversity. Our current NERC-ESRC project aims to provide a synthesis of methods to quantify biodiversity for potential use in biodiversity valuation and trading. That synthesis is informing project partner Plan Vivo's ongoing development of the methodology for its biodiversity standard. A key part of our proposed project is to rigorously field-test shortlisted options for this biodiversity quantification.Once the standard is launched, we will work with our stakeholders to improve it, and develop tools to implement it. The stakeholders have already produced an early draft of documentation for applying for biodiversity credits, and invited 10 of the many interested organisations to use it to put in pilot applications. These pilots (from 8 countries in 5 continents; see Track Record) will be processed iteratively, learning from the experience and from our stakeholder and field research to improve the standard and its workflows before full roll-out.The biodiversity quantification method being proposed for the credit standard requires field sampling and significant cost for project applicants (reflecting the difficulty of measuring biodiversity for economic valuation). In the later stages of the project - once that method has been developed - we therefore aim to develop tools to help select the most appropriate sites for biodiversity uplift projects.Overall, our project represents a synergy of fundamental academic questions addressed as part of delivering on a stakeholder-led initiative with high expected impact.