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What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market

Wauchope, Hannah S; Zu Ermgassen, Sophus OSE; Jones, Julia PG; Carter, Harrison; Schulte to Bühne, Henrike; Milner-Gulland, EJ; (2024) What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 291 (2036) , Article 20242353. 10.1098/rspb.2024.2353. Green open access

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Abstract

Bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires the business and financial sectors to disclose and reduce their biodiversity impacts and help fund nature recovery. This has sparked interest in developing generalizable, standardized measurements of biodiversity—essentially a ‘unit of nature’. We examine how such units are defined in the rapidly growing voluntary biodiversity credits market and present a framework exploring how biodiversity is quantified, how delivery of positive outcomes is detected and attributed to the investment and how the number of credits issued is adjusted to account for uncertainties. We demonstrate that there are deep uncertainties throughout the process and question if the benefits of biodiversity credits, and other efforts to abstract nature to a single unit, outweigh the harms. Credits can only be positive for biodiversity if they are used with unprecedentedly strict regulation that ensures businesses mostly avoid negative impacts and if they are purchased to quantify positive contributions rather than as direct offsets. While there may be a role for markets in attracting conservation funding, they will only ever be part of the solution, especially for the many aspects of nature that cannot be reduced to a unit.

Type: Article
Title: What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2353
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2353
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: Credits, fungible, additionality, leakage, quantify, contribution
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10202558
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