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.

Key Points

The EESC calls on the European Commission to:

• ensure that the biodiversity funding goals established by the GBF are met. This requires sufficient, stable and timely public funding, including from the EU budget, and the phasing-out of environmentally harmful subsidies, such as fossil fuel subsidies. Nature credits can be a tool to help close the funding gap and mobilise private finance, complementing but not replacing public funds.
• enforce environmental legislation and fundamental principles, as an efficient tool to ensure the achievement of biodiversity targets, the funding gap, and a trustworthy nature credits framework;
• ensure that the framework for nature credits is based on strict high-integrity principles along with the mitigation hierarchy and other environmental, climate and social safeguards, and systematically assesses projects’ compliance with those. The methodologies used should be holistic and scientific, and they should be based on an ecologically integrated, outcome-based approach.
• ensure that the governance framework for the nature credits market is science-based, inclusive, transparent and participatory, with a strong focus on actors with the potential to restore and conserve nature, as well as vulnerable and marginalised groups such as youth, women, rural communities and indigenous peoples. Transparent and fair data management and ownership should be ensured.
• approach with caution the need for a Directive or a Regulation, as the establishment of nature credits should remain voluntary while complying with strict rules and criteria. The framework should focus chiefly on positive contributions, while the use of offsetting should be left to the decision of the Member States, so as to not undermine existing ambitious initiatives at national level.
• clarify the alignment of nature credits with other policies, such as the CAP. Nature credits must be built in a way that allows the bioeconomy, circular economy, sustainable food production and forestry to thrive in the EU. The framework should avoid adding unnecessary administrative burden on practitioners, particularly small ones, while ensuring high integrity and a science-based approach.
• ensure that nature credits do not lead to the commodification nature. Land grabbing and speculation should be prevented at all costs. Nature credits should always prioritise integrity over short-term profitability, as well as the fair distribution of benefits and help to reduce inequalities.
• engage cautiously with projects outside the EU, bearing in mind that methodologies and governance frameworks developed in Europe might not fit social, cultural, legal, political and ecological contexts abroad, while generating nature-positive impacts in their value chains outside the EU.