Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 48
ECO NO M ICS
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RE W I L D I NG
It’s good marketing:
You can show you are
having a real impact.
Say we have a terrestrial biome, where we have frogs,
birds, insects and they all respond in much the same
way to protection and increase rapidly in numbers and
in species richness, in abundance. Now, we can record
the biodiversity using acoustic records—so recording
the biome before and after the conservation work—or
taking DNA samples. That data can then be exported
to communities and regional conservation programs to
scale up the work. Then, using the peer review process,
we can get a fast, cost-effective, and trustworthy review
and issue biodiversity credits based on the review.
My work is focused on the restoration of Floreana,
an island in the Galapagos. We’re eradicating invasive
species on that island and that will allow us to reintroduce 13 different extinct species. In turn, that will lead
to the issuance of 2.75 million biodiversity credits. If
you assume a moderate credit price of $12 per credit,
then you can fund that ecosystem’s recovery over the
next 20 years.
carbon credits is that applying them to, say, coastal
ecosystem restoration for example, has been hard to
measure and hard to monitor. And, importantly, many
of these places are used by the local communities, and
so that adds a layer of complexity because it begs the
question of who you deal with when you buy and sell
these credits.
It’s been 15 years or more now that blue carbon
credits have been a thing, but the market is still relatively small. In turn, there’s just a small amount of
money that’s been transferred for coastal ecological
restoration in return for these carbon credits. There’s
some optimism that that is changing, particularly as
the price of carbon has started to go up. For example,
Pakistan is doing the largest blue carbon project in
the world involving 350,000 hectares of mangroves.
Another example is a project I worked on in Guinea
Bissau, where the Parks Authority sold 50,000 or so
hectares of mangroves-worth of carbon credits to protect the mangroves.
But blue carbon projects also take a long time. To
do them right, as it were, where you are measuring
and monitoring and verifying the actual carbon that’s
being sequestered and stored and you’re also ensuring
that the local communities who depend on these ecosystems aren’t getting locked out of them … that takes
a lot of upfront time and work. And it’s much more
There have been some difficulties with the way that
blue carbon credits, which focus on removing carbon
from coastal ecosystems, have been issued and used.
Can you highlight how biodiversity credits are different
to carbon credits?
John Verdun: Before we had biodiversity credits, we
had carbon credits. One of the big problems with the
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