Biodiversity credits shouldn’t copy the carbon market playbook

The useful part

Facebook Linkedin Threads Whatsapp Reddit Email Page link Cite article The biodiversity credit market should stop trying to copy the carbon market's method of reducing everything to one tradable unit, a new op-ed argues. Instead, these credits should be measured by how continuously and independently a claim can be verified, since their benefit cannot be expressed as simply as carbon credits can. Chasing a single elegant number, the way carbon markets did with metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), is not what this field should be racing toward.

How it works

• Every few months, a new market research report tells us exactly how large the global biodiversity credit market is.
• Most commentary treats this gap as a sign that the data are still catching up with a young market, but I read it differently.
• The disagreement is not a data problem waiting for better satellites to fix.
• A market built around chasing one simple, tradable number creates a strong incentive to keep that number moving, and whoever controls how the number gets calculated ends up holding real power over whether...
• Success should be measured less by how quickly the field converges on one elegant unit, and more by how many separate eyes are able to check a number before real money changes hands on the strength of it.

What to take from it

They are quietly making different assumptions about what should even count as a biodiversity credit in the first place, because there is no shared definition anchoring the count the way tCO2e anchors carbon. I raise this not to single out one certifier for blame, but because it points at something structural, and it is exactly the trap the biodiversity market risks walking into. Carbon succeeded, commercially speaking, because it found one clean unit.

Example or evidence

• Jubanayan Saikia is co-founder and CTO of Nature Ledger, a small, early-stage team building real-time biodiversity and environmental verification infrastructure, alongside co-founder and CEO Sayanika Deka.
• Another, published around the same time, puts it at $7.1 billion.
• A separate, and to my mind even more revealing, episode followed.
• The clearest evidence for this sits in plain view, in numbers that most people read as an embarrassment rather than as information.

Details worth keeping

Biodiversity credits shouldn't copy the carbon market playbook (commentary) Biodiversity credits shouldn't copy the carbon market playbook (commentary) Jubanayan Saikia 24 Sep 2026 Global Comments Share article Share this article If you liked this story, share it with other people. "A hectare of mangrove forest is not interchangeable with a hectare of grassland: pretending otherwise is closer to a category error than a measurement gap, and I suspect it is the real reason estimates of this market vary by a factor of 80," the author writes. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

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