Indonesia has seen an uptick in biodiversity financing, with the government encouraging the development of high-integrity biodiversity credits as an innovative funding instrument to fill the funding gap in conservation.Earlier in January, Indonesia and the United Kingdom launched a deeper strategic partnership, with Climate, Energy and Nature as one of the main pillars. With support from the British government and the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits (IAPB), the Indonesian government has even formed a technical team, prepared a policy framework and developed a biodiversity credits pilot project.
At the same time, some experts have expressed skepticism about the scheme, pointing to problems that have arisen in the carbon market’s carbon credits, which works in a similar way.
Cindy Julianty, executive coordinator of Working Group ICCAs Indonesia (WGII), said biodiversity credits sounded promising on paper, as they were being promoted as a mechanism capable of attracting private investment to finance conservation, ecosystem restoration and biodiversity protection.
However, she noted that because the mechanism derived from the logic of the carbon market, biodiversity credits were often difficult to separate in practice from biodiversity offsets, which are mechanisms that allow biodiversity damage at one location to be “compensated” through protection or restoration at another location.
