Contributing a rights-holder voice to nature credit markets

Nature credit markets are being designed right now, mostly in rooms where governments and institutions talk to each other. The people whose territories those credits are generated on are usually represented in slides rather than at the table.

IEG is joining the European Union’s new international political forum, “Friends of Credits for Nature and Biodiversity”, as an Associated Partner. The forum launches at high level at CBD COP17 in Yerevan as an inclusive, government-led initiative building consensus around high-integrity nature and biodiversity credit markets.

The invitation follows IEG’s active participation in the European Commission’s Expert Group on Nature Credits, where the organisation has been making it’s key contribution: a credit market without rights-holder governance is not a high-integrity market, however good the methodology.

What IEG will push for

Alongside global institutions including the Biodiversity Credit Alliance and UNDP, IEG will continue to advocate for three things.

• Primacy of Indigenous and community rightsm and FPIC. Free, Prior and Informed Consent guaranteed across all credit market standards, not offered as a best-practice annexe.
• Direct benefit-sharing. Financial returns reaching Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities directly, with as few intermediaries between the work and the payment as the system allows.
• Data sovereignty. Community knowledge and ecological data protected against extraction that was never consented to.

Guardrails are easier to build into a market than to retrofit onto one. That is what is motivating IEG leaders to dedicate time to the Expert Group.

IEG acknowledges the European Commission for convening the forum, and looks forward to working alongside the Biodiversity Credit Alliance, UNDP and fellow Associated Partners.

Image: Berlaymont building, Brussels by almathias, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0.