VBCs and iVBCs

Innovation in voluntary biodiversity credits and Unit designators

Biodiversity science is incomplete, evolving, and now stimulated by market, regulatory and scientific funding. The high probability is that the next twenty years will show intense changes in biodiversity science, standards, methodologies, and protocols.

Carbon markets failed because of premature claims of scientific certainty, eroding trust and destroying early attempts at carbon emissions regulations. We seek to avoid these failures and claims of greenwashing in biodiversity by clearly delineating experimental solutions from more standardized solutions to follow.

We sincerely hope that risk-tolerant funders will consider deploying capital widely across a number of experimental solutions to fund innovation in the field, and seek to demarcate more standardized approaches to more conservative funders such that expectations are realistic.

Under Cercarbono's adoption of this unit, and hopefully under other certifiers

• Biodiversity credits issued under this unit WITHOUT a methodology, and with MRV alone will be assigned an iVBC designation as an "innovation VBC".

• The first year of a methodology’s adoption under certification bodies it will issue iVBCs, after which if accepted by the market and does not alter it will automatically convert to VBCs.