Nature-based credit markets at a crossroads

A swathe of recent impact evaluations demonstrating disappointing results suggest nature-based credits are at a crossroads. Either nature-based credit markets continue to implement crediting processes replete with implicit incentives to over credit, lose investor confidence and constrain one of our most promising tools for drawing private investment into conservation; or fundamentally reform to adopt the latest scientific understanding on additionality, leakage and permanence, as well as environmental and social safeguards, that will rebuild investor confidence and allow them to upscale to meet the ambition of the Kunming-Montreal and Paris agreements. Here the fundamental problems embedded in conventional nature-based credits and the solutions needed to achieve scientific-credibility are laid out.