Building trust in the wild west

Climate change has been discussed for a long time, and the concept of carbon markets – paying someone to deliver carbon reduction on your behalf – is becoming familiar. But as recently as 2016, I was introducing politicians to what was for most a completely new concept: ‘Biodiversity’. It resulted in the first Scottish Parliament debate on the subject.

We have come a long way: I am sure no reader can be unfamiliar with global biodiversity decline, and the need to turn around terrifying declines in habitats and species from insects to seabirds. Policy is playing catch-up: you can read in these pages about English and Scottish governments’ biodiversity plans. Yet the private sector is rapidly accelerating too, as the nations of the world agree to create frameworks which drive a ‘biodiversity economy’.

We are seeing a ‘free’ biodiversity market emerge. It’s developing extremely rapidly, attracting huge amounts of speculative interest, could represent great opportunities, could also pose risks, and is certainly something every land manager will want to be aware of. But what does it involve?

presents a great opportunity to develop projects which meet their needs. Companies are looking for all kinds of scales and descriptions of projects but broadly they have three key features:

• They will have impact – they deliver genuine and credible biodiversity benefit.

• They will be robust – that benefit will not be at risk of bad headlines exposing stories that trees were not planted, or would have been planted anyway, or communities were destroyed.

• They will have a strong story – the impact of the project will not simply be a figure on a balance sheet; it will have stunning photographs, heartwarming stories, opportunities for close engagement.

‘insetting’ or ‘remote sensing’, but in fact have little depth of knowledge themselves, or have created a business model which is profitable to them without delivering the benefits promised to the buyers. This market does urgently need brokers – the project developers –so what makes Galbraith a safer option? Our approach is to be transparent. For a start, this is still an early-stage market, and if you are looking for a safe and simple option, chances are we’ll advise that it’s not the option for you. We will honestly say that there is much we don’t know – because there is much nobody knows, when the market is evolving so rapidly. What we do have is deep knowledge of land management, business, and communities in Scotland and England, and a wide network of connections to experts who can

More and more companies find themselves under commercial pressure to demonstrate green credentials. For consumer-facing brands this pressure comes from customers. For stock-market listed companies it comes from shareholders such as pension funds which increasingly have stringent Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) requirements. For suppliers, contractors and professional firms it comes from the companies they are working for looking for green credentials throughout their supply chain.

All these companies are beginning to assign budgets to projects that demonstrate they are taking biodiversity decline, as well as climate change, seriously. This

There are as many ways to build this story as there are land managers and interested companies, so this represents a huge opportunity to develop projects.

What are the risks? The huge and rapid expansion of this potential market provides an enormous opportunity for brokers to develop projects and find buyers. Few of the players in this new and rapidly evolving biodiversity market. This makes it relatively easy for brokers to appear to be experts, and to gain the trust of both ‘sellers’ and ‘buyers’ with apparently quick and easy options. They may have command of the jargon of the useful market mechanisms evolving, such as ‘biodiversity credits’, ‘Naturerelated Financial Disclosures’, help fill the gaps in our knowledge. If you do have a vision, and want to build a project, we will build it with you from the ground up, and won’t tie you in to a mysterious ‘black box’ methodology or long-term contract which you don’t understand.

We are actively building a portfolio of potential projects and potential financial partners, so please get in touch if you are interested in hearing more. Don’t just trust us, though: ask us the difficult questions. n