“You can make good money by razing a forest to the ground, but not by planting a new one and letting it grow old”. According to Jessika Roswall, “we do put a price tag on nature”, but “only by taking resources away from their natural environment”.
Invited to the Global Solutions Summit 2025 in Berlin on Monday 5 May, the European Commissioner for the Environment gave a keynote speech focusing on the introduction of ‘nature credits’.
“Now we need a price tag for restoring" nature, said Jessika Roswall, adding that, in the words of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, “we need to put nature on the balance sheet”. This accounting metaphor will have to be translated into a separate table. According to Ms Roswall, by converting nature positive actions into “exchangeable assets”, nature credits offer revenues to those who take nature positive action.
“How do you measure and compare biodiversity? One ton of carbon equals a ton of carbon””, emphasised Jessika Roswall, “but how can fish compare with butterflies, oaks with meadows?”
Both the United Nations and the European Commission are already working to resolve these fundamental issues in order to create a functional ‘nature credit market’, warned Ms Roswall. This involves, for example, assessing “the abundance of species” or “forest cover density in a single hectare”.
The conditions for the existence of this new financial tool will then have to be made possible. In her speech in Berlin, the European Commissioner for the Environment identified two challenges to achieving this: “create an infrastructure so that exchanging these credits in a valuable way can be done in a marketplace” and identify “those willing to pay and invest on an ongoing basis”.
The first initiatives could serve as a model. Following on from what has been said in recent weeks (see EUROPE 13628/4, 13631/9), Jessika Roswall drew on existing projects, taking the example of a voluntary market under construction in Estonia, where “private forest owners get rewarded for the sustainable management of their parcels, by companies who benefit from healthier forests, from touristic operators to energy-intensive companies”.
There should be no shortage of money, according to the Commission, given that “in the euro area, 75% of all businesses seeking loans directly depend on one or more ecosystem services”, Ms Roswall pointed out.
The European Commission will publish a roadmap by the end of the year. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)