Catalysing the emergence of a biodiversity stewardship credit market

人类活动给地球上的生命带来了巨大的压力。由于对物种的直接开发、将其栖息地转变为新的用途、气候变化和其他原因，越来越多的物种正面临灭绝的威胁。许多物种，数百万年进化的结果，已经灭绝了。他们永远失去了。公众普遍认为，应该阻止这波物种灭绝浪潮，但我们中的许多人却在不知不觉中助长了这一趋势。通过我们购买的产品，以及我们和（或）我们的养老基金投资资金的方式，我们可能正在助长助长这种破坏的商业活动。因此，全球金融业联合成立了与自然相关的财务披露工作组（TNFD），以帮助每个人更好地了解公司和投资如何以积极和消极的方式影响自然，以及它们反过来如何依赖于功能正常的自然生态系统。我们的想法是定义一些度量这些影响和依赖的指标，并允许我们评估和比较不同的业务和投资机会，这样我们就可以做出明智的选择。然而，有一个问题：虽然我们知道全球许多物种的数量正在下降，但要决定哪些局部措施最有效地减少由此导致的灭绝风险并不容易。此外，可能不可避免地要改变比我们现有的更多的栖息地，例如建造太阳能农场或种植能够迅速从大气中吸收碳的植物。我们可以尝试通过给物种更多的空间在其他地方生长来平衡对生物多样性的压力。但总的来说，要减少物种灭绝的风险，需要采取多少措施呢？TNFD应该使用什么指标来量化对生物多样性风险的影响？本奖学金旨在帮助回答这些问题。抛开自然的其他特质，它特别关注灭绝风险，以及如何量化企业对这种风险的影响。在实践中试用了最近为此目的提出的一个简单度量标准。TNFD过程的参与者将了解新的度量标准，并仔细将其与其他可用选项进行比较。最后，提出了选择，并为这些度量标准的实际使用开发了文档和场景。在促进这一进程的过程中，研究金将确保TNFD制定的强大框架不会忽视保护我们所继承的地球上丰富的物种多样性，即使现在大自然的其他方面对我们来说可能显得更重要和更有用。

Human activities are putting Life on Earth under tremendous pressure. Through direct exploitation of species, conversion of their habitats for new uses, climate change and other causes, more and more species are being threatened with extinction. Many species, the outcomes of millions of years of evolution, have gone extinct already. They are lost forever. There is broad public consensus that this wave of extinctions should be stopped, and yet many of us are unknowingly contributing to it. Through the products we buy and the ways in which we and or our pension fund invests our money, we may be fuelling business activity that contributes to this destruction. The global financial industry has therefore come together in the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) to help everybody understand better how companies and investments affect nature in both positive and negative ways and how they in turn depend on functioning natural ecosystems. The idea is to define a few metrics that measure these impacts and dependencies and allow us to evaluate and compare different business and investment opportunities, so we can make informed choices.However, there is a problem: while we know that globally the populations of many species are declining, it is not easy to decide which local measures are most effective in reducing the resulting extinction risk. Moreover, it may be unavoidable to modify even more habitats than we have already, for example to build solar farms or to grow plants that rapidly absorb carbon from the atmosphere. We can try to balance the resulting pressure on biodiversity by giving species more room to grow at other places. But how much of this is necessary to reduce extinction risks overall? What metrics should the TNFD use to quantify impacts on risks to biodiversity?This Fellowship aims to help answer these questions. Setting other qualities of Nature aside, it focuses specifically on extinction risk and how to quantify the impacts of businesses on this risk. Use of a simple metric that has recently been proposed for this purpose is trialled in practice. Participants in the TNFD process will learn about the new metric and carefully compare it with other available options. Eventually, choices are proposed and documentation and scenarios for the practical use of these metrics developed. In facilitating this process, the Fellowship will assure that the powerful framework developed by the TNFD does not overlook protecting the rich diversity of species on Earth that we have inherited, even when other aspects of Nature may appear more important and more useful to us now.