S2 Episode 5: Quantifying Nature - The Quest for Standardized Biodiversity Credits

Sinclair Vincent currently serves as the Senior Director of Sustainable Development, Program Development, and Innovation at Verra, a leading organization driving global investment in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. In her role, Sinclair oversees the strategy, direction, and evolution of Verra's suite of programs, including the Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard, the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Standards, and the Plastic Waste Reduction Standard. She is also spearheading the development of Verra's SD VISta Nature Framework, a groundbreaking initiative aimed at scaling investment in biodiversity conservation on a global scale. With a strong focus on market development, Sinclair engages with corporate, commercial, and government stakeholders to ensure Verra's programs empower users to set and achieve increasingly ambitious environmental and social goals.

Discussed in this Episode:

• The crucial role of standardized measurement in scaling biodiversity credit markets
• Strategies for engaging Indigenous peoples and local communities in nature conservation
• The future of biodiversity credits and their potential to drive investment in nature
• Navigating the complex landscape of emerging biodiversity credit methodologies
• Insights on building trust, transparency, and capacity in nascent nature markets

Transcript

David Meyers:
Today we have Sinclair Vincent, Senior Director of Sustainable Development, Program Development and Innovation at Verra. Sinclair oversees the strategy, direction and evolution of Verra’s suite of programs, focused on sustainable development. This includes the Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard, the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards, and the Plastic Waste Reduction Standard. As well, Sinclair leads the development of Verra's SDVista Nature Framework to scale investment in biodiversity conservation globally.

Kim Bonine:
Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the For Nature podcast. I'm pleased to be here with my co-host, David Myers, and we are thrilled to have with us today Sinclair Vincent from Verra, who's going to talk to us more about her work on sustainable development innovation, and nature credits and many other exciting things that she's working on. So Sinclair, thanks so much for joining us today.

Sinclair Vincent:
Thank you for having me.

Kim Bonine:
Great. So I think we just wanted to start with just getting a little bit more background about kind of you and sort of your journey. How did you get interested in certification for carbon, sustainable development, and now nature credits?

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, I suppose if we really want to go back to the root of my passion, I would take us back to me growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, where I had the privilege to witness sea turtles nesting and hatching every year, actually starting about this time, May through October, and learned at a very young age how us humans impact the success rate of those hatchlings actually making it to the ocean with large houses, you know, being on the coastline and shining lights when they're not supposed to and distracting the turtles from the moonlight. So that was sort of my first inkling of being interested in the environment. Fast forward to my academic career, I studied environmental science and management with a focus in corporate environmental management and pollution prevention and remediation.

Sinclair Vincent:
And at some point along the way in my studies, I got quite interested in greenhouse gas accounting and really understanding whether and why companies were tracking their greenhouse gas emissions and if they were doing anything about them, how they would actually reduce them. So that is what eventually brought me to Verra back in 2014, where my initial role was to review projects from around the world that are somehow reducing their emissions, ensuring that those projects have actually quantified those emission reductions or removals according to our rules. But from there, I kind of moved more into the standards development part of Verra, first leveraging that pollution prevention remediation background and led the development of our plastic waste reduction standard a few years ago. And then after that, I took on our full sustainable development portfolio. That's where, of course, nature and biodiversity is one of the most important elements we could focus on within the broader topic of sustainable development. But I guess all of these things and parts of my journey point towards my passion and ability to kind of replicate models and approaches across different sectors. So using standards and impact quantification to bring finance to positive outcomes that wouldn't have happened otherwise. I love kind of connecting the dots and seeing where we can improve rather than reinvent the wheel to generate positive change in various sectors.

Kim Bonine:
Terrific. Thanks. Interesting path to get to where you are and thinking about the importance of, sort of measurement and standards. And I was wondering if you could just briefly share for any of our listeners who aren't really familiar with even the whole idea of these standards, what does that mean and why is that so important?

Sinclair Vincent:
So the standards that we're talking about are generally to help someone somewhere on the ground around the world quantify a benefit that they have generated through the implementation of an activity. So whether that's preventing deforestation and being able to quantify the emission reductions or removals associated with that. Or we used to credit a lot of renewable energy projects to ensure that there's finance going to those renewable energy sources. So those standards serve to help those projects quantify what the emission reductions could be if they went with renewable energy compared to remaining with, you know, fossil-fueled grid. So these standards serve as, you know, sets of rules and requirements to help projects actually design their activities and how to implement them with proper stakeholder engagement and consultation, as well as the methodologies that are used to quantify, to measure and quantify those benefits so that at the end they can say, yes, we are sure that we have generated this amount of benefit, whether it's an emission reduction or biodiversity uplift or increased plastic waste collection or recycling. They all require some sort of standardized measurements.

David Meyers:
Great, which kind of leads us to the measurement of nature, which is not the easiest thing to do, as we're learning, of course. So together, we're involved in the Nature Framework Development Group initiated by Verra. Could you tell us what the goal of this group is, what Verra is seeking to achieve from this initiative?

Sinclair Vincent:
Verra's goal in developing the Nature Framework is to really help channel finance to conservation and restoration activities around the world. We know that there is a funding gap for conservation and meeting the goals and targets set out in the global biodiversity framework. And we think that biodiversity credits and the markets around those can be one of many tools for bringing investment into activities that are conserving or restoring biodiversity. So our role, Verra's role, is really to certify and incentivize that widespread investment in measurable, coming going back to that term, measurable, positive biodiversity outcomes that benefit nature and people. And so to do this, we need involvement and collaboration with a lot of different stakeholders. So the Nature Framework Development Group that you're part of is a big part of that, bringing together experts from across the sector and different elements of conservation and conservation science is quite important to ensure that we're developing something that's actually usable and scientifically sound.

David Meyers:
There's obviously a lot of interest in the concept of nature credits or biodiversity credits. This is, it's been sort of amazing. We've been on this journey together to see in that time, which is only about two years or so, how it's exploded, you know, in terms of interest. And of course, as you point out, it's only one of a mix of possible ways to help finance nature. But where does Verra fit within this mix of actors that are out there trying to come up with methodologies and frameworks and standards and all that? There's so much out there. Just if you could help us navigate a little bit through that.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, absolutely. And I often find myself needing to go back and check for all the new entries and new initiatives that are coming up, which is great to see. And there's a lot of good work out there of kind of mapping the different stakeholders. But Verra is specifically a standard-setting body. So our role in this ecosystem is designing the standard. So like I was mentioning earlier of having a set of rules and requirements that help projects understand how to actually go about designing one of these projects, let alone implementing it and ensuring that they're able to set up the critical monitoring systems needed to track the improvements over time. And to then be able to report those in what we call project description or monitoring report templates. So bringing those rules and requirements and standardization around how projects are designed and implemented, as well as Verra is also developing this methodology that will sit within our nature framework, that is the quantification piece. So that's the set of requirements around how you quantify your biodiversity uplift or avoided loss. There are other methodology developers in the space. Some of those are also standards bodies, and some of those are experts in a particular ecosystem or biome that are developing methodologies for quantifying the biodiversity benefits in those particular ecosystems.

Sinclair Vincent:
But I think it is important to at least highlight the difference between a standards body, which should also have a lot of the infrastructure that's needed to operationalize a methodology, and projects that that are using this methodology to quantify their benefits. So that can include the registry system where credits are actually issued and then can be transacted as well as having systems for the third-party auditing of the biodiversity uplift claimed by projects, and a lot of other key components of sort of that market infrastructure side of things. 

Kim Bonine:
So when we're thinking about this, I think the connection to or the measurement of things like carbon or greenhouse gas emissions, I think conceptually that's pretty clear, pretty straightforward, pretty easy to understand. But with markets for nature, nature credits, you know, this, as David mentioned, this is something that's exploding. But how does this work? You know, when nature tends to be local, highly variable, it's not something as clear as one ton equivalent of CO2. How can this be turned into this credit that buyers and the public can understand or that can be, you know, a methodology, a standardized methodology can be created for something that's so nonstandard?

Sinclair Vincent:
Great question. I think I first want to acknowledge that we as humans are, of course, just one part of nature. And so it is challenging and can often feel a little bit odd to place such human and economic concepts on nature. So I think it's just really important to acknowledge that, because that's, of course, a major challenge in markets and thinking about nature and markets in the same conversation. But that said, humans also have a massive impact on nature, you know, thinking back to turtles on the beach growing up and how we accidentally misguide them away from the ocean. So we need to think about ways that can actually motivate and push humans to understand their impact and actually take action to reduce their impact.

Sinclair Vincent:
As you say, nature is certainly more local and highly variable compared to greenhouse gases. But we are still hopeful that we can bring some standardization to the units that would be generated under Verra's nature framework or, frankly, in any biodiversity crediting system. So we can have comparability without losing integrity and specificity of each project, which is why we are developing a common framework that can enable that comparability at the highest levels, but then be complemented with ecosystem or biome-level modules that help our framework remain adaptable to the specific local context and, you know, whether it's an ecosystem or biome. So the units will be area-based and represent biodiversity uplift or avoided loss over one hectare during the relevant monitoring period.

Sinclair Vincent:
So in other words, they're condition-adjusted quality hectares. Maybe doesn't quite roll off the tongue in the way that tons of CO2 equivalent does in the carbon space, but we're getting there. And based on these units and a few of the most important characteristics of a project, like where in the world is the project? What are some of the key species present in the project area? What are the activities being implemented? What is the significance of those outcomes compared to some of the goals and targets in the global biodiversity framework? The units paired with that type of information and project characteristics should give buyers what they need to understand and be confident in the credit that they're buying and therefore the nature that they're investing in.

David Meyers:
There's so much nuance to this, and my understanding is that Verra will tackle different ecosystems with different approaches, so different methodologies, let's say, to address the subtleties of the different ecosystems in terms of measurement. So let's assume that we can quantify a nature unit and that we can describe and have third parties verify successful conservation outcomes. Who's going to buy that? Where's the market? What's going to drive the market? How can we, for carbon offsets, they're offsets. You emit a ton of carbon. We do it through all of our electricity. You then can purchase an offset that is absorbing carbon, for example, in nature, wetland, or something like that. We don't want people to use biodiversity credits to allow them the right to destroy nature. So assuming that we don't allow that offsetting of nature that already exists in regulatory systems. Who's going to buy these credits to just do good for nature?

Sinclair Vincent:
Another great question and a lot of conversation going on right now in the market and with some of those kind of demand sources to really understand what their needs are. But it's still a very new market. There are a lot of projects or landscapes that need finance to conserve and or restore biodiversity. But at the moment, companies are quite early in their journey of understanding and measuring their impacts and dependencies on nature. That said, I think there are a few potential sources of demands that I think we see as being the opportunity to kind of help scale the finance that we need and that can meet this objective of bringing that funding to conservation. So maybe just to walk through a few of them, I think one is governments who want to finance things, especially where they are aligned with their national goals or targets. So if they have goals or targets already around nature conservation, this is a way for them to understand what that finance is actually resulting in. And as you say, that can also be done in compliance systems, but there is space for voluntary systems to operate as well, especially where there is not a compliance system up and running.

Sinclair Vincent:
And then, of course, there are companies that are trying to meet disclosure requirements. So they could even use these types of methodologies just to quantify their own impacts or outcomes from activities that they're directly implementing. And then there's companies that would want to be investing in their supply chain and its security and managing the risk of biodiversity or nature loss in their supply chain. So that's more akin to sort of this in-setting concept that we're familiar with in the carbon space as well. Really investing in that supply chain, investing in those dependencies that a company could have on nature. I think there's also people or companies who want to buy a land because it will be more valuable in the future, ideally because of the nature or biodiversity that it has maintained or restored. And so I think there are some people that are willing to hedge their bets and invest in nature in that way. And then lastly is, of course, philanthropic funding and the need for interest from some philanthropic funders to have more standardization and accountability for the outcomes that are being generated through that finance source. So I think all of those users could be users of these programs and participants in the biodiversity credit market. I think the largest potential scaling opportunity would be through companies that really depend on nature and have the ability to invest in sustaining it into the longer term.

Kim Bonine:
And I'm curious, Sinclair, as you talk about these exciting opportunities, what has been the receptivity in your experience from various governments or various companies to getting on board with this? And what are the biggest limitations for those who do have the interest? Or well, is it first getting the interest? Is it getting the political will or just getting the buy-in? Is that kind of the biggest barrier? Or is it more there's interest, there's buy-in, but there's just not the data. There's not the spatial modeling. There's not the information needed to help them get to the point where they want to be.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, I think the interest and intrigue is there from especially the corporate side, but they're not necessarily familiar enough with what their needs are to sort of match that interest, intrigue with concrete actions just yet. And at the same time, a lot of these frameworks, whether it's on the disclosure side or on how you can invest in nature through voluntary compliance mechanisms, they're all still kind of in their earlier days of development and implementation. And so I think a lot of companies and other potential market participants are sitting back to just see how things evolve and learning along the way while they make sense of their own impacts and dependencies and where they would strategically want to invest.

Sinclair Vincent:
The other really important piece that is essential for any company to ever be willing to invest in these types of units is the transparency component and the claims component. These companies really need to understand what kinds of claims they can make on the back of purchasing one of these credits. To David's points earlier, these are not compliance offsets. And so what are they? And companies need to understand exactly what they are and what they can say about them, what they mean, you know, compared to their footprint or compared to their nature-positive journey. How do they fit into that? How can they strategically identify the right opportunities aligned with their own impacts, dependencies, and, you know, strategic goals? So I think it's up to the market to help bring that part of the market infrastructure of the transparency around claims and what these credits really mean. And a lot of people are working on it, but it's of course not as straightforward as in carbon. So it'll still take a little bit more time.

David Meyers:
So much work to do and so little time if we want this to be helpful to us. So, you know, we know that indigenous peoples especially are a huge force for conservation across the globe and that they are responsible for managing something around 80% of the world's biodiversity. This is more and more recognized how important this is and how they have not received adequate funding over the course of the past in terms of carbon or conservation funding. They're more and more engaged now, which is a great thing. But how can we bring Indigenous peoples and local communities into the discussion on biodiversity credits? And I know you've been working on this, Sinclair, so love to hear your thoughts on that.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, I mean, Indigenous peoples are absolutely essential in the success of this market, or really any effort or tool or approach to help conserve serve and restore biodiversity. As you said, they're already the stewards of 80% or so of biodiversity around the world. So to think we can do this without them is, it just won't work. So they can and should be engaged, especially starting in some of these high-level initiatives like the Biodiversity Credit Alliance or the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits led by the UK and French governments. These groups can hopefully, and I think they're are already doing this, but provide a channel for Indigenous peoples and local community members to provide their views and recommendations for consideration across the entire market. So rather than requiring these types of groups to have to go to every single methodology developer, every standard developer, and provide that same input and perspective, and recommendation, would be exhausting and unfair. So I really hope that these high-level initiatives can provide that channel and feed that perspective into the entire market.

Sinclair Vincent:
That said, of course, Verra is also working hard to specifically engage with these groups to ensure that the framework we're developing reflects those perspectives and the way that nature has been stewarded for many, many years. So we conducted a consultation specifically for Indigenous peoples and local communities late last year and early this year. That was a combination of virtual and in-person sessions where we introduced the concept and structure of our draft nature framework and then had an open dialogue for participants.

Sinclair Vincent:
We learned a lot through that process and also just had a platform for them to share their views. And some of them were positive, some negative on the market as a whole. But it's really important for us to hear that and try to address any potential risk as we can. Our goal is to develop a framework that can be implemented directly by Indigenous peoples and local communities, so they don't necessarily have to depend on some global north project developer. But if they do or choose to, we also want them to be able to fully engage in the project design and implementation process. So this includes keeping requirements as simple and accessible as possible without sacrificing rigor, thinking back to then the buyer side, the entity that might be purchasing these credits, and what types of claims they need to make about these investments. There is some level of rigor that's necessary. But I think the core opportunity for Indigenous peoples is to actually lead projects and access the finance for the critical nature stewardship that they do. So whether they are the developers of the project or otherwise, their involvement now in the development process, design process of the market will enable them to participate fully and effectively throughout the design and implementation of projects seeking nature or biodiversity credits.

Kim Bonine:
One of the things that's come up as really important in these different processes, working with local communities, working with indigenous peoples or any groups that might have a historical history or reason to be cautious or maybe mistrustful of two key things are around building trust and also around building capacity. Things with sustainable enterprise development, that's often something that's this long-term engagement with different actors, you know, working with local communities, local peoples. And I'm curious how you've seen that. Sort of the role of that or the importance of that or the success of that, you know, sort of in these initial efforts to work with different groups and different communities for whom some of these ideas might even be anathema to be, you know, at the beginning and sort of how to build that trust and then how to build their capacity to be in that lead role, which might be a longer-term process in some cases.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, I mean, trust is, of course, something that takes time to build. And luckily, we don't have a fully operational market just yet. And so we are still able to continue building many of those relationships that goes for Verra and its specific work, but also kind of across the market and its stakeholders and building those relationships and perhaps taking a different approach by including these voices in a much more significant way than that perhaps was done in the beginning of the carbon markets. So yeah I think it's the trust part is essential and it takes time so we have to let that play out quite a bit. But to your point on capacity building, I mean this came up in every session we had in our indigenous consultation, actually a lot of times that the conversation shifted over to the indigenous peoples or local community members speaking amongst themselves to think about you know how could they better inform each other share experiences with particular project developers or in certain regions of what they've learned through either carbon markets or just, you know, nature stewardship in their day-to-day lives and really seeing that desire amongst themselves to build that capacity. So of course, there's ways that organizations like Verra or conservation organizations around the world can help do that. But I think it's most powerful and effective when they can be communicating to each other where there already is trust. So I think it will need to come from all angles for us to succeed in reaching our conservation goals. But absolutely a lot of work that can and should be done now and to the future.

David Meyers:
You knew it would come to this at some point. We've talked about indigenous people as good stewards for conservation. Historically, carbon credits have been allocated where there has been historic deforestation or a threat of deforestation, and to create a concept that would be independent from that, in other words, could reward good stewardship, maintenance, biodiversity. We did include in the last consultation, this concept of nature stewardship credits or perhaps nature stewardship certificates. And we got some feedback on that in that consultation. You know, I'm obviously very passionate about this as a second or another path for nature credits. We'd love to get your thoughts on where this could go and how it could fit into a mix if it's something you stand alone, different or... And I know it's early stage, so we're not going to hold you to it.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yes, I appreciate that because, of course, the development process is dynamic and requires consultation and a lot of input from various stakeholders. But in our first consultation, as you mentioned, we did include the concept of nature stewardship as a kind of a credit or a certificate that would be different from a nature credit, as we call them, and the rest of the nature framework. We received generally positive feedback on the concept and support there, but of course, just questions around, you know, how would it actually work? What are the details? How does it differ from a nature credit as proposed in a restoration or avoided loss scenario? And so those are the details that we're now trying to start thinking about and sorting out of just how different would these approaches need to be, which would then help us answer the question of, you know, are these different frameworks or just slightly different methods or requirements for the different scenarios? Hopefully, we're able to pursue both pathways and do that and as simple of an approach as possible. But yeah, I think there's a lot of interest broadly in the market around how do you actually reward the ongoing stewardship of nature where there might not be imminent threat. Of course, one of the big debates we've had in the development process is, is there anywhere that is not under some kind of threat, given the changing climate and all kinds of pressures that we're well aware of that humans or human-induced climate change is causing? So the jury is a little bit out on how many areas are not under threat as it would be defined in the nature framework or in nature credit. It. But regardless, we do want to continue to explore this nature stewardship pathway and ensure that especially Indigenous peoples are able to access finance that is needed or deserved for the work that they're doing to conserve and maintain nature. I think this concept will get more and more traction over the next year or so in the market. But just as it's important for us to be really clear with the demand side of what does a credit represent and what kind of claim can they make about it? That will be equally as important for a stewardship unit or certificate. And to be clear on the difference between those two of what do those units represent and how can they be credibly communicated about from a buyer perspective.

David Meyers:
Yeah, I know… I know it's so you don't want to add confusion to an early market like this. But in reality, it's an enormously confusing market to start with right now with something on the order of 30 different methodologies being developed globally. And there's no dominant paradigm or vision. There's some shared concepts, but really no one could tell you today what a nature credit or a biodiversity credit really is. We're all working towards that and greatly appreciate your effort, Sinclair, and of course Verra's effort to move us forward in this in a very systematic way that I think is the only way to build up a credible unit. So very excited to be collaborating with you and watching this evolve in real-time, which has been fascinating.

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah. And if I could just comment on one of the parts you just mentioned of 30-something methodologies being developed out there right now, and that is confusing. It's a lot to make sense of, but I think this is the time to have that sort of proliferation of different approaches being tested and allowing that innovation because this is a complex thing to try to quantify and to really be able to credibly report on changes in biodiversity. So really hopeful that the market can keep allowing for some of that innovation, as long as certain thresholds of quality and some of these core principles that have already been established are upheld in those early versions. I think over time, we'll see some consolidation or testing of approaches and some will work and some will not, or some will work in certain circumstances and others not. But I think this is a really important period of innovation and testing for this market. So it's exciting to see the willingness of people to kind of put their ideas out there and get them tested.

David Meyers:
Yeah it would be nice if we had lots of time then we could you know let this market evolve and then the winning methodologies would prevail and then we could go to countries and say to them look here's a methodology that's been proven over the last 10 years put this now into your national legislation and regulations and you've got yourself a national market we're just not there yet. There are of course countries that are trying to move in that direction and without the evolution testing of these different diverse methodologies. So it'd be nice to accelerate that testing in some ways, and we're hoping to support that kind of thing as well as you are. And so, great. Well, any last thoughts from either you or Kim before we wrap up the podcast?

Kim Bonine:
Sinclair, what you see as, or maybe what you hope to see sort of five years from now, as David was talking about, the evolution of the market or the accelerated evolution of the market of where you think we might be five years from now and how that might mirror or diverge from the path of, say, carbon markets?

Sinclair Vincent:
Yeah, I mean, I'm quite hopeful. I think, again, coming back to the energy and effort that's already being put into this very, very nascent market, I think that gives me a lot of hope that in five years, we'll actually see way more progress than you would have seen in the first five years of carbon or even what we've seen so far in the plastic credited space. So I think we'll probably see some of that consolidation of approaches and methodologies and better access to data. There's a lot of data that's still not quite available or at the quality or scale that we need. And so we kind of are starting to understand what we need. So we'll be gathering that, working on that, improving the systems along the way, seeing some consolidation, and actually seeing a good number of projects moving through the system. Regardless of what standard they're using, but continuing to help us test beyond the pilot stage, but the full implementation stage, testing these approaches and actually having credits on the market and finance flowing. It won't, of course, be at the scale that we see in carbon at this moment, but I think we'll reach that scale much faster.

David Meyers:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sinclair, and sharing this process that you're in and wishing us all success as we move forward and build this new market.

Sinclair Vincent:
Thanks again for having me.

Kim Bonine:
Thanks so much for joining us.