Biodiversity credits shouldn’t copy the carbon market playbook (commentary)

Filed 1h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Medieval Loop One

Alexander Nakarada · creatorchords.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: PMO Barbados from Bridgetown, Barbados · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A commentary argues the biodiversity credit market should abandon carbon markets' approach of reducing everything to a single tradable unit, pointing to wildly inconsistent 2025 market-size estimates ranging from $90 million to $7.1 billion to $5.7 billion. The author, a biodiversity verification startup co-founder, argues this near-80-fold gap reflects a real category problem, since a hectare of mangrove and a hectare of grassland aren't interchangeable the way a ton of carbon dioxide is.

The piece cites carbon markets' own credibility problems as a cautionary tale, including a 2023 investigation finding over 90% of Verra's rainforest offset credits likely worthless, and 2024 criminal fraud charges against a former carbon developer executive who also sat on Verra's board and helped write the crediting methodology he was later charged over.

The author calls for biodiversity markets to prioritize independent verifiability over a single elegant metric, framing the current confusion as an early warning rather than a problem to rush past.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When three reports on the same market can't agree within a factor of 80, that's not a rounding error, that's three different people describing three different animals and calling them all a horse. Carbon markets learned the hard way that whoever controls the number controls the money, usually after the credits were already sold. It would be nice, for once, to see an industry read the previous industry's cautionary tale before living it themselves.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Medieval Loop One · Alexander Nakarada · CC BY 4.0

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