Roadmap towards Nature Credits

The EU Youth Test at the EESC was applied to this opinion. The European Youth Parliament for Water (EYPW) was chosen by a group of interested youth organisations to represent all of them during the opinion-making process.

Practical information

1. Composition of the study group
2. Administrator / Assistant in charge: Gaia Bottoni, Gaizka Malo / Isabel Antunes
3. Contact

Background

Nature is our strongest ally to support our livelihoods, health and prosperity. It provides essential ecosystem services such as retaining water, ensuring soil fertility and pollination. It contributes to climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience against disasters, often in a very cost-effective manner. For companies, it contributes to determining production processes, credit worthiness, and access to financing. This also affects the risks for the financial institutions that grant loans to these companies, which is why financial supervisors show an increasing interest in nature-related risks. Nature is therefore a crucial foundation for a competitive and resilient economy.

However, according to the EEA's Europe's environment 2025 report the overall state of Europe’s terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity is poor and has been deteriorating over recent decades. The prospects for 2030 and 2050 are also negative and reaching policy targets requires fully implementing environmental legislation, mainstreaming action into key sectors, and transforming key production-consumption systems. 

The people who are at the front lines of nature stewardship, such as farmers, foresters, landowners and land managers, fishers, users of sea and freshwater ecosystems, conservation area managers, and local communities, must be appropriately rewarded, through the marketplace, for contributing to safeguarding and improving the strategic economic asset that nature is.

In the finance toolbox for biodiversity and nature, certification and credits are emerging as a potentially valuable way to complement public funding. By facilitating investments in activities that benefit nature, these innovative and voluntary tools can play a crucial additional role in preserving the health of our land and marine ecosystems and help reverse the decline in biodiversity. With a view to strengthening the bioeconomy, these tools can also provide an opportunity to generate income to the people involved in the protection, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems, as highlighted in the Vision for Agriculture and Food, the Water Resilience Strategy, and the European Ocean Pact, while ensuring food security and the multifunctionality of forests.

The roadmap sets out a path to achieving these goals. The aim is to complement different sources of nature finance such as public funding by supporting the development of high-integrity tools – nature credits – that will turn investment in nature into a reliable engine of value creation. The EESC's opinions will provide the contribution of organised civil society to the debate, bringing together different points of view and interests.