Wauchope Hannah S, Zu Ermgassen Sophus O S E, Jones Julia P G, Carter Harrison, Schulte To Bühne Henrike, Milner-Gulland E J
School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2024 Dec;291(2036):20242353. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2353. Epub 2024 Dec 11.
Bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires the business and financial sectors to disclose and reduce their biodiversity impacts and help fund nature recovery. This has sparked interest in developing generalizable, standardized measurements of biodiversity-essentially a 'unit of nature'. We examine how such units are defined in the rapidly growing voluntary biodiversity credits market and present a framework exploring how biodiversity is quantified, how delivery of positive outcomes is detected and attributed to the investment and how the number of credits issued is adjusted to account for uncertainties. We demonstrate that there are deep uncertainties throughout the process and question if the benefits of biodiversity credits, and other efforts to abstract nature to a single unit, outweigh the harms. Credits can only be positive for biodiversity if they are used with unprecedentedly strict regulation that ensures businesses mostly avoid negative impacts and if they are purchased to quantify positive contributions rather than as direct offsets. While there may be a role for markets in attracting conservation funding, they will only ever be part of the solution, especially for the many aspects of nature that cannot be reduced to a unit.
扭转生物多样性丧失的趋势需要商业和金融部门披露并减少其对生物多样性的影响，并为自然恢复提供资金支持。这引发了人们对开发通用、标准化的生物多样性测量方法的兴趣——本质上是一个“自然单位”。我们研究了在迅速发展的自愿性生物多样性信用市场中这些单位是如何定义的，并提出了一个框架，探讨生物多样性是如何量化的，积极成果的实现是如何被检测并归因于投资的，以及所发放的信用数量是如何调整以应对不确定性的。我们证明，整个过程存在深层次的不确定性，并质疑生物多样性信用以及其他将自然抽象为单一单位的努力所带来的好处是否超过了危害。只有在以前所未有的严格监管下使用信用，确保企业大多避免负面影响，并且购买信用是为了量化积极贡献而非作为直接抵消手段时，信用才会对生物多样性产生积极影响。虽然市场在吸引保护资金方面可能发挥作用，但它们永远只是解决方案的一部分，尤其是对于许多无法简化为一个单位的自然方面而言。
