Pollination and other ecosystem services vital to food production are under increasing threat from human activity. In this interview article, Dr Gareth Thomas of the Natural History Museum explains why teamwork is integral to the long-term success of initiatives designed to protect them, such as the development of nature and biodiversity credits.
When we think of pollination, we typically picture honeybees, ferrying their precious cargo from flower to flower, then heading back to the hive en masse for the important task of making honey. But pollination isn’t necessarily a team sport, or even one exclusive to bees; rather it depends on many insect species with diverse habits.
The domesticated honeybee and the wild bumblebee are both social animals. But many of the most efficient pollinators – such as the red mason bee – are more solitary types.
With a single species of honeybee pollinating just 5-15% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops, the 24 bumblebee species and 240 solitary bee species that make up the country’s wild bee population are doing a lot of heavy lifting, pollination wise. Not to mention the many species of wasp, moth, butterfly, hoverfly and beetle that also support this critical ‘ecosystem service’.
And it’s these wild populations that are at risk, potentially threatening food systems. Pollination is one of the ten most important ecosystem services provided by nature to humanity, supporting around a third of global crop production.
Recent data shows a 24% decrease in the distribution of key pollinators – particularly wild bees and hoverflies - in the 40 years to 2022, with 42% of species becoming less widespread in the UK. The fortunes of wild bees have fluctuated overall, but hoverflies have suffered a steady decline: half of species are less widespread than in 1980.
The Joint Nature Conservation Committee, which published the data in its UK Biodiversity Indicators 2024, said the main threats to pollinators were habitat loss, environmental pollution (including the widespread application of pesticides), climate change, and the spread of alien species.
A key part of the solution to the problem is to preserve the habitats that underpin pollination and other ecosystem services, as was recognised by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which was adopted by 196 countries in 2022, with the aim of protecting 30% land and sea area by 2030 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
Unlikely allies
Like pollination, turning such targets into reality depends on many different parties across the human ecosystem, both acting alone and in concert.
Dr Gareth Thomas, head of research innovation at the Natural History Museum (NHM), is an expert in biodiversity and collaboration. Since taking up his post in 2022, Thomas has spent a lot of time bridging the gap between academia, business and government to improve understanding of how to measure biodiversity, the better to protect and support it.
“Because we sit at that interface, we can help convene unlikely allies, translate across those silos, and bring evidence to where it’s needed,” he explains.
Specifically, Thomas has been helping the public and private sector to use a tool developed by NHM researchers in order to make business and policy decisions that have a positive impact on biodiversity, or at least a less negative one.
The tool is the Biodiversity Intactness Index, initiated, developed and still overseen by Dr Andy Purvis and Dr Adriana De Palma, co-leads of the NHM’s Biodiversity Futures Lab. The index provides a measure of how nature has responded to pressures imposed by humanity, estimating the percentage of the original number of species still remaining, and their abundance in a given area.
It draws on almost six million data points from multiple ecological studies covering more than 54,000 species of plants and animals, including pollinators. It was used as an indicator in the GBF and can be used to predict the impact on local biodiversity of human-induced changes, for example to farming techniques or land use.
Due to its utility in informing policy decisions, the index is free to governments and academics, but corporates and financial institutions are asked to pay toward its development. Firms including engineering group Arup, reinsurer Munich Re and consultants Accenture are using it to assess client impacts on biodiversity.
Collaboration versus consensus
According to Thomas, one of the biggest differences between the modus operandi of policymakers, business and academia is “pace”.
Partly because of the need for accountability to funding bodies, academic institutions insist on strong governance mechanisms before they agree on any form of partnership or collaboration.
For different reasons, policymakers are similarly keen on ‘decision by committee’, while collaborations with the business world tend to be more transactional and rapid, says Thomas, with clear terms, risks and responsibilities defined.
“Collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean consensus,” he adds. “It means learning to work across misaligned timelines and incentives. Scientists need rigour, policymakers need legitimacy, and businesses need clarity and confidence.”
Like pollinators, parties to complex nature-related decisions don’t have to do things the same way; but they need to find a way to share the same space and goals.
“You don't get alignment by asking everyone to agree; you get it by building tools and frameworks that people can trust, even if they don't always agree on the exact answer.”
Financing biodiversity
Thomas has further experience of collaborating with multiple stakeholders to develop just such a framework – in the interests of boosting nature restoration - through his work with the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits (IAPB).
Biodiversity credits are a way of channelling private finance into projects that restore or preserve biodiversity in a particular location. They have similarities with carbon credits – which seek to remove or avoid greenhouse gas emissions - but they have marked differences, representing a step change in our understanding of how to take meaningful action to protect ecosystem services.
For example, biodiversity credits are not offsets – they are standalone investments in biodiversity and do not give the buyers free rein to do damage elsewhere. Further, they are not comparable, transferable or ‘fungible’ because the projects they fund will have such different objectives and outcomes.
In many ways, the carbon markets embody the errors of ESG 1.0. Buying carbon offsets helped purchasers feel like they were saving the planet without changing their habits or practices. And numerous design failures – notably inadequate measurement techniques, poor levels of transparency along the transaction chain, and a lack of consultation with impacted local communities – meant too many projects did more harm than good.
Further, their shortcomings undermined the credibility of broader green investments, giving rise to accusations of greenwashing, and fuelling popular and political scepticism.
While the carbon credit industry has belatedly acted to get its house in order, the IAPB is trying to get the rules straight for biodiversity credits before the market gets off the ground.
Initiated by the French and UK governments, the IAPB issued its global framework at COP16 last October in the Colombian city of Cali, the first global biodiversity summit since the GBF was signed in Montreal in 2022.
Its 21 high-level principles across three pillars – verifiable nature outcomes, equity and fairness for people, and transparent market governance - were launched alongside the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Biodiversity Credit Alliance (BCE), a UN-convened scientific body.
The latter defines biodiversity credits as “a certificate that represents a measured and evidence-based unit of positive biodiversity outcome that is durable and additional to what would have otherwise occurred”.
The hope is that a trusted, high integrity biodiversity credit market can grow quickly, contributing to the GBF’s target for raising US$200 billion across all finance sources for nature preservation by 2030.
Scale through integrity
The IAPB “deliberately avoided vague ambition” says Thomas, one of its panel of academic advisors.
“We focused on high integrity rules and tested use cases in the knowledge that credibility could unlock scale faster than just consensus alone,” he explains.
“The IAPB framework was designed to provide a science-based foundation for the biodiversity credit markets. Think of it as a blueprint, not just for how the credits work, but how they earn trust – because if there's no trust within the financial community, then they'll fail.”
The framework’s principles seek to define high integrity, with reference to concepts such as ecological additionality, permanence, equity, baselining, measurement and verification.
And while recognising the need to help financial institutions to manage their risk management obligations, the IAPB wanted to ensure they didn’t make the mistake of overlooking other stakeholders.
“The IAPB placed a lot of emphasis on bringing indigenous community voices into building and reviewing the framework. We've seen from carbon credit projects that ignoring indigenous and local communities ultimately kills trust. High integrity biodiversity credits must be co-created and co-governed at the local level. That’s non-negotiable,” insists Thomas.
The IAPB’s working group on stewardship was co-chaired by Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, the tribal chief of the Paiter Surui an indigenous people living south of Brazil’s Amazon region.
“If local communities aren’t recognised as co-designers, that can lead to pushback, protests, and ultimately failure,” says Thomas.
National ambitions
While balancing the priorities of investors, indigenous peoples and scientists, Thomas says it was equally important the IAPB delivered to policymakers “something that was actionable”. This means ensuring the principles could be easily incorporated into policy initiatives that would stimulate demand for biodiversity credits, thus channelling finance flows toward nature preservation.
The NHM gave voice to widespread unease of the gap between national policies and the GBF’s targets at COP16 with the release of its ‘Towards 30 by 30’ policy brief. A stark measure of inaction was the small number of countries that had submitted national biodiversity plans before the summit.
To have most impact, the 30x30 brief said policymakers should prioritise land that matters most for people in specific ecosystems; move beyond static designations to a ‘managed-up’ model of active improvement; and strengthen tools used for modeling and monitoring.
Those recommendations strengthen the conditions under which biodiversity credits could meaningfully support restoration efforts – by focusing on ecosystem services, not just designations, says Thomas.
“The 30x30 target provides the national ambition. But unless those policies are linked through shared data and unified governance, we risk fragmentation disguised as progress. We need to move from [a series of individual] schemes towards a systems-level understanding of how to channel money through to nature-based projects,” he adds.
Speaking at a recent conference, IAPB co-chair Sylvie Goulard noted the importance of collaboration to support GBF objectives, echoing Thomas’s call for concerted and coordinated policy action by governments.
“Cooperation between regulators, standard-setters and the private sector is key,” said Goulard, a former deputy governor of the Banque de France, stressing also the need for government to take more responsibility.
“They signed the Paris Agreement. They signed the Kunming-Montreal Agreement. So now they must deliver,” she said.
While there is latent supply and demand interest for biodiversity credits, it takes governments and regulators to set up market rules, including incentives to turn a cottage industry into a meaningful channel for nature-positive investment.
Pollination, a global climate and nature investment firm, estimated that less that US$2 million of credits had been sold by last September, financing positive biodiversity outcomes across no more than 125,000 hectares (for comparison, London covers 157,000 hectares). Nevertheless, WEF has predicted the global market for biodiversity credits will grow to US$2 billion by 2030, rising to US$68 billion by 2050.
Is the UK squandering its lead?
Last February, the UK government sought to kickstart the biodiversity credit market by requiring developers to demonstrate a minimum 10% improvement in the biodiversity of any site on which they build new properties. If they are not able to achieve this biodiversity net gain (BNG) through actions taken on-site, developers must mitigate their impact elsewhere, ideally locally, through the purchase of credits based on defined biodiversity units.
But the scheme has been slow to get off the ground, with a fraction of the expected 5,428 hectares per year so far being reserved for habitat restoration. This week, the Environmental Audit Committee, a cross-party group of MPs, said current policies would not deliver the investment needed to meet the UK’s nature preservation and restoration obligations under the GBF.
It called on the government to demonstrate its commitment to the BNG scheme introduced by its predecessor, also noting that its existing processes lacked transparency, flexibility and funding. MPs also queried how BNG would interact with a proposed Nature Restoration Fund, to be established as part of the forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill. A separate report has recommended a review of how funds from biodiversity credit purchases are distributed.
“Initiatives like BNG need to prioritise site-specific ecological value and community context - not just administrative boundaries,” adds Thomas.
Much-needed clarity is likely to follow the current government consultation on the development of high integrity carbon and nature markets, which is seeking feedback on the integration into UK regulation of six principles, based in part on the work of the IAPB and standard-setters in the carbon markets.
Interestingly, the consultation uses a broader definition, eschewing ‘biodiversity credits’ in favour of ‘nature credits’, which represent a measured increase in biodiversity or ecosystem services. Under the UK government’s terms, nature markets “encompass payments for activities that deliver environmental outcomes through nature-based activities”, including biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as nutrient mitigation and nature-based carbon sequestration.
“I think the UK consultation on carbon and nature credits is promising, if we treat it as a chance to stitch together what we already have, rather than just bolting on another layer,” says Thomas.
Picking up the pace
While policymakers in the UK and elsewhere go through the necessary consultative processes for setting the rules for channelling investment in biodiversity and ecosystem services, there are also public-private collaborations that are pushing ahead at a quicker pace.
These include the development of a voluntary nature credit market in Scotland, where the devolved government’s nature agency is working with a UK fintech, CreditNature. The scheme is based on the creation of a standard to support the generation of high integrity credits – called the Ecosystem Restoration Code - which is aligned with the principles set out by the IAPB, but with a slight twist.
Using an ecosystem condition index, the resulting nature credits will support a range of co-benefits, not just the biodiversity improvements needed to support pollination, but also the ecosystem services that support soil health, water filtration and carbon sequestration.
Anyone lucky enough to own a garden has the opportunity to observe many insects at this time of year, attesting to their differing patterns of behaviour, such as a preference for one flower over another. Just as pollination relies on the actions and motivations of diverse species, not just the honeybee, the survival of ecosystem services will depend on us taking many paths – different but convergent - in a common cause.