ERA is an impact developer with the mission to accelerate the adoption of ecological conservation and restoration.
We leverage carbon finance and payment for ecosystem services to generate social-environmental impact, by financing, implementing and developing premium certified projects.
With the growing necessity of recognizing the complexity of our planetary crisis and going beyond the “climate-change” lenses, companies and people are becoming ever more aware of the need to shift from a carbon-centric approach to a holistic, systems-thinking, eco-centric axiom. Biodiversity is at the core of this philosophic, corporate and societal shift.
Market solutions that adequately value ecosystem services can deploy capital to conservation activities, consolidating the “protector-receiver” principle enshrined in many national and international legal frameworks, which consolidates the idea that companies and persons that develop or enhance ecosystem services should be remunerated for such efforts.
Currently, land stewards who maintain critical habitats for umbrella species, are poorly compensated for the plethora of ecosystem services they are providing to the society. Habitat conservation activities currently typically receive funding from carbon credits or ecotourism. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to provide these land stewards a methodology to transform the presence of keystone species within their property into biodiversity tokens to increase their financial returns from conservation.
Notwithstanding, companies are at a loss at how to engage with and improve SDG 15 - Life on Land. Looking at the demand-side of biodiversity tokens, this new credit type offers the possibility for corporations, companies and persons to make “biodiversity claims” and show their support to maintain critical habitat for animals that we all know and love.
With the development of initiatives such as Task Force on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), this will become an ever-growing reality.
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The biodiversity credits will offer a market-oriented solution led by innovative emerging technologies to easily monitor and recognize habitat conservation efforts led by land stewards. Easily tradable and retirable tokens on a ledger can offer a “one-click” away solution for the funding of biodiversity protection and monitoring projects. In addition, the interconnectivity and wide reach of the biodiversity tokens can bring environmental consciousness and actionable responses to increase funding to support conservation reserves.
Staking environmental assets such as carbon, biodiversity and water helps increase the financial returns to land stewards, recognizing and rewarding the importance of their actions from a more holistic approach to conservation. Biodiversity tokens must be another tool that conservationists can apply to their projects, instead of just focusing on carbon.
ERA´s biodiversity token project is intrinsically linked to the concept of bringing keystone species to the center of ecosystem regeneration. By guaranteeing that ecological sanctuaries harbor large carnivores such as the jaguar and the Brazilian mountain lion, a trophic cascade is enabled and habitats can be maintained and/or restored to their former complexity and abundance.
By the standards of scientific literature, keystone species are species that have low functional redundancy and such a degree of interaction with other species in which their absence from the system inhibits major ecological processes. If a keystone species disappears from the system, no other species would be able to fill its ecological niche. Therefore, keystone species management projects are known to successfully restore biodiversity in the ecosystem level.
Keystone species are recognized worldwide for conservation projects that have succeeded in re-establishing the species ecological processes to restore and maintain the entire ecosystem. For example, in Yellowstone Park (USA), the reintroduction of wolves continues to offer ripple effects of direct and indirect consequences throughout the ecosystem, even 30 years after the first efforts of re-establishment of the species in the region. In the Província de Iberá (Argentina) the re-establishment of a viable jaguar population brought so many ecosystem benefits that the surrounding community was able to visualize beneficial economic activities for nature and sustainable development in the region, becoming a great example of a conservation and sustainable development project for an entire biome.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brazil/@-13.6573936,-69.7152704,4z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x9c59c7ebcc28cf:0x295a1506f2293e63!8m2!3d-14.235004!4d-51.92528
Indeed, projects that assess ecosystem health with a focus on species that are good indicators for environmental quality have the advantage of numerous indirect benefits. However, the bottleneck of conservation projects is still the sustainability of long-term actions to ensure stable change in the environment, thus guaranteeing the occurrence of species and the ecosystem services they provide.
The Biodiversity Token Methodology for Keystone Species Stewardship and Monitoring is intended to be a hybrid approach in between an outcome-based and a practice-based methodology (one which will be referred as “environmental stewardship”), understanding that biodiversity stewardship is a complex and holistic endeavor, which can be deployed and fulfilled through a mix of indicators that make use of quantitative and qualitative data.
Essentially, it will be used by Project Proponents and other stakeholders to develop monitoring data and obtain consequent ecological indicators for the keystone species within a project area, as well as ecosystem health indicators, composed by data such as ecological corridors and water source protection within the given chosen species habitat.
As stated, these will be assessed together with the environmental stewardship indicators, such as property management, social engagement and financial strategy indicators. The methodology will be applied through an intricate scoring system which will reflect this rich variety of datapoints. The methodology will apply scientifically rigorous and technology-driven monitoring approaches focused on maximizing data and estimates on keystone species health and presence in a project area, while minimizing monitoring and sampling efforts and costs.
Field monitoring activities will be coupled with ongoing remote sensing data such as camera traps, radio and GPS collars or more innovative methods such as bioacoustics. When necessary, field sample and monitoring such as observation methods such as recordings of sightings and vocalizations, feces collecting, fur-traps, footprints, birth dens and nests, will also be used to assess keystone species health while remote data and peer reviewed literature will also provide an assessment for species health.
Our mission is to develop forest & grassland conservation projects that generate significant socio-ecological co-benefits, catalyzing payment for ecosystem services.
