A U.S.-based company Savimbo has an unusual biodiversity credit scheme on offer, reports Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta.
“It is the only for-profit, biodiversity credit company that has been bringing Indigenous people to sit down in internal private meetings that are just between us and Savimbo to think about what biodiversity credit looks like for us, and how we should be doing it,” Ñawi K. Flores, a thought leader of the Andean and Amazonian Kichwa, Kutakachi Nation, told Mongabay.
Voluntary biodiversity credits have recently emerged as an innovative finance scheme to fund biodiversity conservation. Companies that want to support conservation can directly pay people who protect or restore nature. In return, they earn voluntary biodiversity credits. These credits can’t be used to offset damage that the companies may have caused elsewhere.
But as Mongabay’s report shows, several Indigenous and environmental groups and researchers worry that, like the carbon credit market, biodiversity credits could be used to offset damage and continue business as usual . Moreover, the scheme could be harmful to Indigenous and local communities who are often the stewards of carbon- and biodiversity-rich lands. Carbon credit schemes, for example, have led to a land grab in communities that don’t have clear land rights. They’ve also created internal conflicts and brought in an influx of unscrupulous middlemen and unjust contracts, which reduces the amount of money that actually reaches community members.
To avoid these problems, Savimbo worked with Indigenous conservationists and leaders, as well as smallholder farmers, in the Colombian Amazon, to co-develop a biodiversity credit scheme.
The methodology is kept simple: every hectare of land can earn community members one biodiversity credit — the community members could either own the land or manage it. Then to generate a credit, the members need to install camera traps on this land. The communities in the Colombian Amazon chose the Jaguar as their indicator species, so every time cameras record a jaguar, a credit gets created. Each credit is valid for two months. In this way, local communities use jaguar sightings as a proxy to gauge the health of their intact or threatened ecosystems.
“The first day they get a jaguar video, they have a biodiversity credit on their balance sheet,” Drea Burbank, founder and CEO of Savimbo, told Mongabay. “It’s automated. And the minute they upload it and we validate it, they have credits on the balance sheet.”
Savimbo’s methodology is designed to get money into the community members’ bank accounts quickly, Drea added.
Moreover, contracts with the communities are for one year at a time. Many carbon credit contracts, by contrast, are 30 years long . “So, Indigenous people, by using their free and pre-informed consent, can test it out for one time only, and then decline to join the next cycle. It will be their own self-determination,” said Flores.
Credits
