A company developing biodiversity credits in South America is in the closing stages of having its project methodology approved by standard body Cercarbono, after which it hopes to have its credits listed on two carbon trading platforms before the end of the year.
Savimbo produces indicator species credits in cooperation with smallholder farmers and Indigenous groups in the Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspot in the Colombian Amazon.
The company is expecting to finalise its agreement with Cercarbono next week, according to CEO and co-founder Drea Burbank.
It is currently hosting projects for jaguar protection, and the standard body has accepted its methodology for that, though details remain to be agreed on the scope for applying it to other types of species and habitats, such as oceans and coastal regions.
“No functional changes [have been made to the methodology] despite hundreds of reviewers. It still appears to work on every ecosystem on earth, although the ocean community has not reviewed it well yet,” Burbank said.
Savimbo began pre-sales of its credits earlier this year, saying those would be independently certified once an agreement was in place with a standard.
Burbank now expects Cercarbono to finish certifying those units by December and unsold credits to appear in the Ecoregistry, which has partnered with Cercarbono.
Savimbo is in talks with Xpansiv on listing the credits on its CBL platform, one of the main trading platforms in the international voluntary carbon market. Xpansiv has a cooperation agreement with Cercarbono, but has yet to make a decision on Savimbo’s jaguar credits.
However, in the near future, Savimbo’s credits will be listed on blockchain-based Senken, a carbon trading platform launched last year in Berlin, according to Burbank.
That event will make Savimbo the world’s second pure biodiversity credit to list on a blockchain-based carbon trading platform after Colombian outfit Terrasos. In June, Terrasos announced its first batch of credits from the Meta habitat bank – which are listed on Climate Trade – had sold out.
During its pre-sale period, Savimbo credits have sold at a fixed price of $5 each. Initially that will also be the case once it launches on Senken, though if a large buyer community develops on the blockchain platform – or potentially on Xpansiv later – auctions will likely be arranged.
ECOSYSTEM PROTECTION
Savimbo’s jaguar scheme is based around working with smallholder farmers and Indigenous groups to protect their natural areas, using jaguars as an indicator of the ecosystem health.
The local communities are given handheld cameras to document the presence of a jaguar, and one credit represents 60 days of jaguar presence on one hectare’s worth of land, counted as 30 days prior to and after the observation.
It currently works with 13 Indigenous groups and 200 smallfarmers across 16,500 hectares of land, with a 20% monthly growth in project area.
Burbank told Carbon Pulse that some of its pre-sold credits had gone to companies whose objective it is to help protect the Amazon.
Normally purchasing REDD+ credits in the voluntary carbon market, some of these had calculated that the simplistic monitoring approach used by Savimbo allowed them to protect 1 ha of the Amazon for just $30 per year, compared to a cost of around $100 via REDD+ projects, Burbank said.
While its work has been focused on jaguars so far, the US-based company is hoping to expand to other indicator species in future, such as pollinators, killer whales, and several others – either through its own work or seeing its methodology adopted by other developers.
“It is important to point out that even if this is our methodology, anyone can use it,” said Burbank.
By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com
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