Building a Biodiversity Credits Market

Shaping a high-integrity natural capital market

Designing a biodiversity credits market that fully captures the value of nature while enabling economic returns, biodiversity conservation and social justice requires collaborative input from a range of actors and participants.

The World Economic Forum is convening leading organisations from civil society, biodiversity conservation, standard-setting, project development, business, finance and academia to shape this high-integrity market. Through dedicated working groups, the initiative focuses on three priorities:

• To explore the supply and demand dynamics for the voluntary biodiversity credits market, identifying the drivers and incentives of demand, and mobilising a community of early movers.

• To develop a clear set of high-integrity and governance principles that promote transparency and inform robust methodologies to secure long-term benefits for the environment and IPs and LCs.

• To learn from pilots and early-stage transactions to establish and promote a blueprint for high-quality projects.

Getting involved

Building on the momentum around nature finance as part of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework negotiations at COP15, Financing for Nature is an inclusive platform for collaboration and innovation.

In 2023, it aims to set up a “coalition of the willing”, gathering both buyers (corporates, cities and countries) and sellers (project developers including IPs and LCs) to test the high-integrity and governance principles and showcase that market-based mechanisms can achieve both nature- and people- positive outcomes.