Biodiversity Credits: A Guide to Identify High-Integrity Projects

The World Economic Forum's guide establishes a framework for assessing the integrity of biodiversity credits, focusing on environmental and socioeconomic standards. It details ten guardrails—ranging from the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to technical requirements like additionality and leakage—to ensure credits deliver real benefits for nature and people. The document emphasizes that these guidelines complement existing corporate due diligence and are intended to evolve as the market matures.

• The guide identifies ten essential integrity guardrails for biodiversity credit projects: rights of IPs and LCs, benefit-sharing arrangements with IPs and LCs, legal rights, transparency requirements, independent validation and verification, monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), third-party issuance, additionality, durability (permanence), and leakage.
• High-integrity projects must respect and protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs), including their land tenure, self-determination, and the requirement for free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).
• Project developers are expected to establish transparent and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements with IPs and LCs, ensuring that the distribution of economic benefits is commensurate with established standards.
• To ensure legal integrity, developers should provide a legal due diligence report conducted by local experts that assesses country-specific tenure systems, including customary law and potential claims by neighbouring IPs and LCs.
• The guide proposes a shift in the definition of additionality for biodiversity credits: while financial additionality remains key, regulatory additionality may be waived for underfunded government-protected areas if credit finance is necessary for management actions.
• To prevent double counting and ensure transparency, the guide recommends that credits be administered and issued by independent third parties using registries that uniquely identify and track issuances.
• Project durability is linked to both risk management and social equity; developers must provide permanence risk assessments and ensure local communities benefit, as projects failing to do so are likely to fail ecologically.
• The guide addresses 'leakage'—the unintended displacement of harmful activities outside a project area—and requires developers to estimate these impacts and deduct them from the reported biodiversity outcomes.

APA

World Economic Forum (2024). Biodiversity Credits: A Guide to Identify High-Integrity Projects. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Biodiversity_Credits_A_Guide_to_Identify_High-Integrity_Projects_2024.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Biodiversity Credits: A Guide to Identify High-Integrity Projects. 2024. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Biodiversity_Credits_A_Guide_to_Identify_High-Integrity_Projects_2024.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Biodiversity Credits: A Guide to Identify High-Integrity Projects |date=September 2024 |url=https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Biodiversity_Credits_A_Guide_to_Identify_High-Integrity_Projects_2024.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2024biodiversity, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Biodiversity Credits: A Guide to Identify High-Integrity Projects}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2024}, month = sep, url = {https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Biodiversity_Credits_A_Guide_to_Identify_High-Integrity_Projects_2024.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }