As the voluntary carbon market (VCM) rapidly expands and evolves, its surrounding regulatory and scientific infrastructure is becomingly increasingly sophisticated. Ecosystems are complex, and it’s becoming clear that variables such as biodiversity are essential to ensuring the long-term success and value of carbon credit projects.
To this end, an international consortium of restoration groups have developed The Global Biodiversity Standard (TGBS), with support from Acorn. TGBS is an emerging assessment framework for certifying the biodiversity impact of many kinds of land management projects, from agricultural initiatives to tree planting campaigns. By creating a standardized process for fostering resilient ecosystems, TGBS supports ecosystem integrity worldwide. In doing so, it also enhances the long-term value of carbon projects. Bringing together scientific innovation and local community knowledge, TGBS is the much-needed next step in elevating both the economic and environmental value of carbon credit projects like Acorn's.
Setting a New Standard for Carbon and Biodiversity Traditionally, carbon credits have been valued primarily on how much carbon they can capture and store, but this narrow focus can lead to unintended consequences, such as the planting of non-native species. Kyle Nielsen, an Acorn innovation consultant, elaborates, saying: “I’ve seen first-hand the destruction that nature-based carbon projects can do to an area when the sole purpose is carbon repayment. Acres of non-native eucalyptus are planted, for example, which can change the pH of the soil, can alter water tables, and offers no short-term benefits to the farmers.”
Image: Example of field work assessing biodiversity criteria: Beetle surveys at a project site in Uganda
TGBS aims to rectify this with its rigorous evaluation process, which takes a more nuanced view of a proposed project. Biological criteria are given top priority, like selecting appropriate sites for proposed projects, prioritizing the usage of native, rare and threatened species, and avoiding the use of invasive species. But sociocultural factors are considered as well, such as integrating the existing knowledge and methods of local communities. The TGBS assessment framework uses a dual approach, combining:
Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is the world’s largest plant conservation network and one of the standard’s key developers. On Acorn’s partnership with BCGI in the development of TGBS, Nielsen says, “We chose to work with BGCI because their expertise is both scientific and human-centric. They draw from local botanical gardens with knowledge of the academic literature but are also incorporating the local applications and challenges.”
Acorn has played a role in the development and launch of TGBS in two key dimensions. Firstly, we’ve collaborated with BCGI and the other organizations behind the standard to create, test, and refine the standard's methodology in our existing agroforestry projects in Kenya and Uganda. Secondly, the Acorn team has led the remote sensing arm of the standard’s development and implementation. Dr. David Bartholomew is the TGBS project manager at BCGI. He says, “Remote sensing is essential to understanding not only the baseline condition of the project, but then going on to confirm the trajectory of change in biodiversity as the project evolves. A lot of remote sensing mostly focuses just on biomass and carbon, but we need to go deeper than that.”
Acorn’s innovations in detecting biodiversity using satellite data have been instrumental to making sure that TGBS’ assessments ‘go deeper’, offering new methods for evaluating landscape connectivity and functional diversity through spectral signatures. (You can read more about these remote sensing innovations here). Acorn’s involvement has helped to ensure that TGBS is robust, reliable, and applicable across a range of environments and project scales, making TGBS ideal for encouraging other carbon projects to include a stronger focus on biodiversity.
So how does something like TGBS make a difference in the VCM? The success and long-term value of a carbon sequestration project depend not just on how much carbon it captures, but on the health and resilience of the ecosystem it operates within. Biodiversity plays a critical role in this equation—healthy, diverse ecosystems are more resilient to environmental changes, ensuring that carbon captured today remains sequestered for decades to come. “In some ecosystems, higher biodiversity can also enhance carbon capture,” says Bartholomew, making biodiversity a variable of manifold value.
Nielsen emphasizes the impact TGBS could have on the participant and global community levels, saying, “At Acorn we spend a lot of time with the local partners on agroforestry designs that will benefit farmers in the medium- and long-term, planting trees that the farmers want and that suit the area. By contributing to TGBS, we want to quantify the difference that attentive agroforestry design can have on the area compared to monocropping systems. We believe biodiversity is that metric.”
Many involved in its creation see the standard as an opportunity to drive large-scale biodiversity recovery by leveraging the significant investments currently flowing into carbon projects. Bartholomew adds, “If we can help VCM players invest in projects that prioritize biodiversity and make sure that these projects are done properly, and these projects have better long-term carbon removal outcomes than those that don’t prioritize biodiversity, then we incentivize investing in projects that have a much more positive impact on the world—both in terms of carbon removal and in terms of ecosystem health and resilience.”
TGBS certification doesn’t stop at the project’s implementation. It focuses on continuous improvement over the lifetime of a project, with ongoing monitoring to ensure that the project's environmental benefits are sustained over time, and includes a mentoring program to support project implementers. As the standard gains recognition, it could drive a shift in market dynamics, where carbon credits certified under TGBS are seen as a premium product and come with a guaranteed level of transparency, offering assurance investment in a TGBS-certified project is driving real, verifiable outcomes. This could lead to higher market prices for TGBS-certified credits, sparking a virtuous cycle that incentivizes more projects to meet the rigorous criteria set by the standard. Not only that, but higher valuation of TGBS-certified carbon credits means a higher economic return for smallholder farmers participating in projects like Acorn’s, where farmer’s see 80% of the profits from their agroforestry efforts.
When Bartholomew and the rest of the TGBS team officially launch TGBS at the COP16 for the Convention on Biological Diversity in October of 2024, they hope the world will see that certification frameworks like TGBS are the new paradigm that will radically improve the real-world impact of the VCM.
We help support smallholder farmers in developing countries transition to agroforestry. Together with local partners, we facilitate the funding and training needed by farmers to start their agroforestry transition. Transforming the sequestered CO2 through agroforestry into Carbon Removal Units (CRUs), we offer carbon credits to responsible corporates to help them reach their climate goals. The growth of the trees is measured with satellite imagery, AI and LiDAR, and certified by ICROA-accredited Plan Vivo.
With 80% of the sales revenue going directly to the farmers, it creates an additional income stream and helps them adopt a more climate-resilient way of farming that improves food security, biodiversity, and financial independence.
