Biodiversity Certificates: Building Trust in Nature-Positive Finance

How do we finance biodiversity protection without repeating the mistakes of carbon offset markets? That question shaped the fifth BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive, where Flore Bastelica of Carbone 4 introduced a financial tool designed to bring credibility and transparency into nature restoration: Biodiversity Certificates.

Unlike traditional offset schemes — where environmental harm in one place is balanced by restoration in another — biodiversity certificates shift the focus from compensation to contribution. Instead of paying to cancel out damage, buyers support projects that create measurable, verified ecological gains: restored wetlands, richer soils, healthier pollinator habitats, resilient forests. For a certificate to be issued, those gains must be additional, durable, and scientifically documented — improvements that would not have happened without the payment behind them.

Developing a Protocol for Real-World Use

Bastelica explained that BIO-CAPITAL is now developing a shared protocol to make this possible across the project’s use cases, from grasslands and agroecological farms to river corridors and wetlands. The work involves iterative testing, alignment across partners, and constant feedback from practitioners on the ground. The goal is not just to generate certificates, but to make sure they are trusted.

Trust matters, because carbon markets have shown how quickly credibility can erode. Over-estimating results, failing to account for ecosystem leakage, ignoring local communities, or allowing credits to sit in opaque private registries have all harmed confidence in nature-based finance. To avoid those pitfalls, the Deep Dive highlighted safeguards: rigorous measurement methods, independent auditing, transparent registries, and local participation in governance. A certificate, in this design, becomes proof of something real — not a promise on paper.

Certificates, Not Credits

This is also why Bastelica advocates for using the term certificate over credit. Credits are often seen as a right to pollute; certificates signal a verified contribution to nature. They can stand on their own, or complement other instruments such as green bonds, payments for ecosystem services, or insurance schemes — acting as evidence that biodiversity gains have actually occurred.

Momentum for such mechanisms is growing. The European Commission’s Roadmap for Nature Credits (2024) calls for new tools that align investment, regulation and ecological science. Through its pilots, BIO-CAPITAL is helping shape what that future could look like: biodiversity outcomes that are measurable, verifiable, investment-ready — and worthy of public trust.