...and be instrumentalised politically to distract from the need to regulated overextraction, shift existing harmful subsidies and curb water pollution at source.
Link to our short brief: greenfinanceobservatory.org/wp-content/u... 5/5

As the roadmap towards nature credits has been added under the flagship actions of the Water Resilience Strategy, we fear that water quality trading might be part of #naturecredits in the future, 4/5

The provision of clean water might even be more appealing to institutional investors than biodiversity, as it is perceived by some as having the potential to provide high revenue streams. 3/5

...several neoliberal governments and institutions are pushing to financialise the purification of water, using a similar framing and talking points to those used with carbon and biodiversity. 2/5

Same story with plastic offsets that some oil producing countries and lobbies push as a way to avoid a global cap on plastic production. 3/3

I couldn't agree more, biodiversity credits/offsets are indeed imo mostly about protecting the status quo, i.e. helping maintain the social licence to operate for harmful activities, rather than curb them & shift public subsidies away from them and towards conservation. 2/3

to the weak additionality of maintenance credits, the allowance for the ex ante sale of credits and the absence of ban on secondary market trading. See our short brief: greenfinanceobservatory.org/wp-content/u... 2/2

from the lack of ambition and generosity of Global North Countries, and from Brazil's recent granting of a new oil drilling licence in the Amazon region. 3/3
www.climatechangenews.com/2025/10/21/a...

it also relies on a contested free lunch assumption, and its expected returns are based on a ridiculously short 20 years data sample.
It is however a political success, in that it occupies a lot of media space and diverts attention... 2/3

274 civil society organisations have already signed a manifesto opposing this false solution, designed primarily to protect the status quo and the profits of harmful activities. 2/2 www.biodmarketwatch.info

I wrote in English, not sure why it mentioned French

In this sense, we understand the politics of biodiversity markets to be like that of carbon offsetting, namely to protect vested interests and the status quo for a few more years, but at the risk of threatening our own survival. 3/3
Our brief greenfinanceobservatory.org/wp-content/u...

We note that privatising conservation policies will weaken them by introducing a profitability requirement.
We understand the main objective to be diverting the conversation away from the need to curb biodiversity destruction in EU, as doing so would hurt short-term growth and competitiveness. 2/3