“Carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and other ecosystem-service payments can provide a comparative alternative source of conservation revenue to trophy hunting.”

Other alternatives, such as payment for ecosystem services (PES) and carbon credit schemes, present promising mechanisms for compensating communities and landowners for maintaining natural habitats. … While these models are still maturing, they may in time provide more inclusive and durable conservation finance. In some landscapes, PES may complement or gradually replace hunting revenues altogether.

We propose the need for a regional and international wildlife conservation credit system similar to the carbon credit applied under climate change [149, 150] . … The wildlife conservation credit could be considered as part of the payments for ecosystem services [30, 151] , for those who decide to avoid trophy hunting and support nonconsumptive forms of wildlife utilization.

The decreasing numbers of hunters in Europe and the United States, the increasing calls to ban trophy hunting in Africa, and the COVID-19 pandemic all demonstrate the danger of conservation and local livelihoods relying heavily on revenues from tourism. Therefore, it is increasingly evident that alternative or at least additional mechanisms for funding conservation need to be identified.

The study shows that ecotourism could generate profits that are much higher than trophy hunting values, as well as resulting in greater sustainability. This seems logical, since trophy hunting is a once off value, whereas ecotourism generates recurring revenue over time, surpassing the hunting value over time.

The Finance Plan proposes revising the policy of subsidization and taxation of agriculture and tourism, as well as introducing new finance and economic mechanisms, biodiversity and carbon offsets.

The WWF Beyond Tourism initiative is geared towards seeking new revenue models that enable both the professional conservation sector and communities to derive income from wildlife, and manage their natural resources sustainably. Examples of this are conservation friendly businesses, certification schemes, payment for ecosystem services schemes and innovative finance solutions such as impact investing and Wildlife Credits. Our overall ambition is to develop a conservation-finance model that is less dependent on tourism and hunting.

Biodiversity credits are increasingly being promoted as an innovative tool for closing the biodiversity finance gap. A growing number of providers are offering biodiversity credits, either linked to carbon credits or as a new asset class in their own right.

Building a high-integrity biodiversity credit market requires recognition of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities as stewards of nature. Including culturally salient species as a metric in the measurement and monitoring of biodiversity credits — with the consent and guidance of Indigenous and local authorities — may be one pathway towards this pursuit.

For conservation outside of parks to be successful, sufficient revenues must be generated from wildlife to offset opportunity costs associated with protecting wildlife and habitats.

Some hunting revenue may be able to be replaced by ecotourism (Di Minin 2013).

Take the Tondwa Game Management Area in Zambia. The game reserve is situated within a Key Biodiversity Area which, because of a lack of government funding and law enforcement capacity, has seen its wildlife populations decline. This area will soon host one of the world’s biggest biodiversity credit projects. The local community in Zambia, along with an environmental non-profit called Conserve Global, gained biodiversity management rights and will work with project developer ValueNature to supply credits to private sector buyers.

Some critics contend that biodiversity credits risk redundancy with existing market instruments, including nature-based carbon credits or payments for ecosystem services.

Though conservancies likely cannot produce the funds on their own to implement expensive deterrents, such as electric or chili fences, conservancies can still play an essential role in implementing novel deterrents when provided with sufficient funding and support. This raises an important point about the role of CBC governance as a link between household-level needs and international conservation interests.

Payment in the form of access or entrance fees (see 6.4.2.1 on fees) for wildlife watching -a key non-extractive use practice -or for cultural ecosystem services (Church et al., 2017;Cook et al., 2020) is seldom considered as a payment for ecosystem service, highlighting both overlap between instruments and knowledge gaps in the role payments for ecosystem services can play in non-extractive uses (Bigger & Dempsey, 2018;Christiansen, 2021aChristiansen, , 2021bDempsey et al., 2022;Frost & Bond, 2008;Ouma et al., 2018).

While focusing on biodiversity credits, the considerations included in this roadmap are broadly applicable to other nature financing mechanisms, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES), green bonds or nature-linked loans.

The Hadza people, often called “the last archers of Africa,” are selling carbon credits generated from conserving their forests and using the revenues to employ their youths as scouts to keep forest destroyers away.

Biocredits are a suitable and fitting alternative to biodiversity offsets, that fit with the guidelines and the needs of the Uganda NBSAP.

Land can be conserved through paying community members cash in hand for not over-exploiting it. Examples such as Carbon Tanzania demonstrate that such payments (for carbon credits, for example) can be enormously successful for conserving wild spaces. … Paying community members directly through a carbon credit system, for instance, is far more likely to yield ecological and economic sustainability than trophy hunting.

Unexpected links between the pro-trophy hunting lobby and advocates for an emerging market in biodiversity credits have highlighted the bullshit capitalist agenda at the heart of Global North solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises. … In the Earthshot blog, Dickman introduced two existing carbon credit schemes with biodiversity dimensions. Notably, she detailed the ‘Lion Carbon’ initiative. The scheme is a partnership carbon credit programme between Dickman’s Lion Landscapes conservation organisation and Zambian-based forest carbon offset company BioCarbon Partners (BCP).

Ms Chandra argues that while tourism and donor funding are helpful and significant for conservation in Africa, they are ultimately unpredictable and vulnerable to shocks such as pandemics or political changes across the globe. … “We always talk about diversifying risk when it comes to investment and so this avenue – biodiversity credits – offers alternative and complementary revenue streams,” she told The EastAfrican.

Simon Morgan, a South African ecologist, says he and his colleagues came to the idea of biodiversity credits after watching the Covid-19 pandemic devastate tourism in Africa. "So much of our conservation efforts are underpinned by tourism," he says. He thought, "'Well, what else can we do?'"

According to the National Carbon Monitoring Centre, Tanzania has registered 99 active carbon projects with a combined value of more than US$1 billion. More than 5.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent have already been reduced.

But relying too heavily on trophy hunting to sustain conservation would be a mistake. It should be used as just one tool in a diversified biodiversity economy toolkit.

Biocredits markets fall under the wide category of “nature markets,” which are markets that value and trade a wide range of ecosystem services.

Good evidence and data on the economic significance and conservation benefits of hunting in African countries is limited, polarising a fractious debate and making it difficult to fully evaluate the overall effect of trophy hunting.

Beyond tourism revenue, these conservancies earned USD 3.9 million from carbon credits in 2023, demonstrating the diversity of PES mechanisms. … Namibia's combination of hunting, tourism, and emerging carbon credit revenues provides resilience against market shocks. Kenya's diversified conservancy model demonstrates alternative approaches when hunting is not available.

Migratory populations are also likely to try unsustainable agriculture due to the lack of local livelihood options, something this project addresses through payments for ecosystem services.

The Makame WMA project is financed by the sale of carbon credits generated from avoided deforestation of forest land expected to be converted to non-forest grazing land and from tourism revenues. … Payments to Makame WMA take the form of Payments for Ecosystem Services and are financed by sales of carbon credits.

In southern Africa, the focus has long been on hunting and photographic tourism rights and concessions, while logging concessions have been more prominent elsewhere on the continent. … More recently, the value of natural ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide has become the basis for voluntary carbon markets that focus on avoiding deforestation. … Extending this principle, some communities are receiving income and benefits based on the presence of wildlife or their ability to preserve the habitat of key wildlife species (known as biodiversity credits or wildlife credits).

The Makame Savannah project was developed in partnership with the Makame Wildlife Management Area (WMA), a community-run conservation organisation that gives five participating villages legal management rights over the land. Income from the project supports the WMA’s work creating land use plans and employing Village Game Scouts to carry out patrols to prevent poaching and deforestation.

The large-scale growth of nature-based solution markets (e.g. carbon and biodiversity credits) provides a major opportunity to generate significant revenue streams for conservation and communities.

The ‘Global Roadmap to Harness Biodiversity Credits’ and accompa nying Advisory Panel is initiated in collaboration with the United Kingdom. It builds on the report ‘Innovative Finance for People and Planet’ prepared by the GEF and the International Institute for Environment and Develop ment (IIED) for the One Forest Summit in Gabon in March 2023.

The Makame WMA has seen a 980% revenue increase between 2017 to 2021 with over $1 million in carbon revenue earned through the sale of carbon credits so far.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an approach to conservation that recognizes the economic value of ecosystem services and creates financial incentives for their protection.

There are essentially three ways to generate it: photographic tourism, hunting, or state subsidy. Most landscapes can only support one.