UK and France launch global roadmap to scale biodiversity credits

The UK and France jointly launched the UK-French Global Biodiversity Credits Roadmap at the Summit for a New Financial Pact in Paris on 22-23 June 2023, to expand the market for biodiversity credits. The initiative aligns with COP15 goals and signals an emerging nature-finance instrument Indian companies and conservation projects may engage with.

The UK and France introduced the UK-French Global Biodiversity Credits Roadmap, launched by Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey at the Summit for a New Financial Pact held in Paris on 22-23 June 2023. Biodiversity credits allow individuals and companies to invest in projects that restore or enrich nature, recording where action took place, who developed it and how it is measured and checked. The roadmap aligns with the COP15 agreement and targets international milestones including the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16).

Companies seeking to invest credibly in nature recovery, project developers across habitats such as rainforests, oceans and grasslands, and Indigenous peoples and local communities are central stakeholders. The roadmap commits to sharing best practices, implementing governance mechanisms, ensuring genuine biodiversity improvements, and distributing income equitably among Indigenous peoples and local communities. An advisory panel of global experts, co-chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett, will guide working groups to maximise benefits to nature, people and planet from biodiversity credit markets.

Indian corporates with biodiversity-dependent supply chains, conservation NGOs and project developers should monitor the advisory panel's working groups and the governance and measurement standards they produce, since these will shape credit credibility and integrity. Entities should track progress toward COP16 in 2024, where biodiversity financing will feature prominently, and assess how the roadmap's principles on equitable benefit-sharing intersect with India's own emerging Green Credit Programme and nature-finance ambitions.

Key figure — Launch summit dates: Paris, June 22-23 2023