Submission on Helping nature and people thrive: Exploring a biodiversity credit system for Aotearoa New Zealand discussion document

^{Afforestation at Cassie's Farm, Maungakawa, Cambridge, PCE.}

The Commissioner has prepared a submission for the Ministry for the Environment and the Department of Conservation on their discussion document – Helping nature and people thrive: Exploring a biodiversity credit system for Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Commissioner supports exploring the idea of a biodiversity credit system – but recommends that the Government consider other options to fund the enhancement and protection of indigenous biodiversity. These could include biodiversity certificates, resilience bonds or direct payments.

Before doing further work on any scheme, the Commissioner said that the Government should address the following issues:

• Private versus public – should the system incentivise biodiversity benefits on private and/or public land and should this be funded through private and/or public investment?
• Voluntary investment versus offsetting – what are the risks and benefits of including voluntary and non-voluntary (i.e. offsetting) activities within the system?
• Monitoring, reporting and verification – how can the additionality of funded activities (i.e. actions that wouldn’t have taken place without funding) be adequately assessed without being prohibitively costly?