Voluntary Biodiversity Credits
In Scotland, achieving the outcomes in the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy is a public and private responsibility. Scottish Government is currently working to refine its understanding of the role private finance can play alongside existing public investment in nature, such as the £65M Nature Restoration Fund (NRF).
As part of its activities, Scottish Government with NatureScot and SEPA are supporting CreditNature, to develop an option for a new voluntary biodiversity market in Scotland that has strong potential to help scale responsible private investment into nature restoration in Scotland.
This joint approach between an internationally recognised pioneer in biodiversity credits and national government, has the promise of 'baking in' strong Ecosystem Integrity into a wide range of Scottish projects; complementing carbon sequestration centred methodologies.
Following the outcome of a competitive research and development procurement process, CreditNature were selected to take part in the Scottish Government’s flagship innovation accelerator programme, CivTech. During the Accelerator, CreditNature developed a solution to the CivTech Challenge of “How can biodiversity credits be designed in a way that provides simplicity for projects and buyers and enables investment in Scotland’s nature?” set by challenge sponsors, Scottish Government, NatureScot, SEPA and the Scottish Wildlife Trust.
During this acceleration phase, the NFCA was founded and now supports CreditNature's work, through our mission to bring about a holistic approach to nature investments in the UK, that embraces the company's concept of putting ecosystem integrity first, ahead of the selling of individual 'ecosystem services'.
Following the Accelerator, Scottish Government and NatureScot are providing funding of c. £500k to CreditNature under a pre-commercial agreement.
Scottish Government and its partners will assess CreditNature’s market proposition at the end of the pre-commercial stage (September 2024) in terms of its alignment with, and potential contribution to, our National Strategy for Economic Transformation vision for natural capital markets.
This assessment will draw heavily on emerging standards from the British Standard Institute’s Nature Investment Standards programme and forthcoming Scottish Government policy, notably the Natural Capital Markets Framework.