Ekos As A Biodiversity Market Enabler

Ekos has developed a biodiversity credit financing instrument called the ‘Sustainable Development Units Programme’. Ekos CEO Dr Sean Weaver said the SDU Programme is a market based mechanism to support any of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including, but not restricted to, biodiversity.

“We developed a biodiversity market demonstration activity and transacted (and publicised) our first biodiversity credits under this system in mid 2022. We are now using lessons learned from that first project to refine the programme for general launch,” he said.

“We actually transacted our first biodiversity credits back in 2014, but have only got round to developing a full system more recently,” Weaver said.

“Our biodiversity credits are not offsets of any kind. They are a nature-positive initiative for people and organisations who want to cause good with their purchase of biodiversity credits,” he said.

“The target market includes corporate social responsibility buyers, financial institutions, philanthropists, and those who want to sell biodiversity-enriched value chains. Imagine a future when every product or service in the economy is biodiversity enriched by embedding a slice of biodiversity conservation into each,” he said.

Biodiversity credits are being promoted by the government as one option for financing much-needed biodiversity conservation in its recent release of the National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity.

The key to consumer trust in biodiversity credits is the transparency and integrity in the system that produces the credits. The Ekos Sustainable Development Units Programme is based on a standard, an activity methodology, a financial integrity methodology, a unit registry, and an independent validation and verification protocol.

“We built a unit registry using blockchain technology with tech partners in Denmark, and this registry forms the foundation of integrity for our programme,” Weaver said.

Dr Weaver is a founding member of the international Biodiversity Credits Alliance and is helping to define the integrity safeguard foundations for biodiversity markets globally.

“Integrity safeguards will need to form the bedrock of the emerging biodiversity market if it is going to succeed at any realistic scale. Without this, buyers, investors, and the wider community will not trust it,” Weaver said.

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