This protocol is designed to help local communities scale the restoration of degraded nearshore ecosystems and provide direct market access to philanthropic, donation-based funding via SeaTrees Biodiversity Blocks. It is a roadmap for designing effective marine restoration projects that can be funded via the issuance of voluntary biodiversity credits. This protocol also contains three ecosystem-specific modules, which provide guidelines and best-practices for restoring coral reefs, mangrove forests, and kelp forests. This protocol does not allow issuance of carbon credits.
A secondary goal is to support rapid improvements in both the science and practice of biodiversity restoration and protection through the emerging Voluntary Biodiversity Markets. Our approach challenges key tenets of carbon markets to serve the above stated goals, given the difference in market stage and mechanics, as well as the current urgent need for climate action and biodiversity conservation.
Fundamentally, this protocol describes the process of predicting and measuring “Biodiversity Uplift” from marine restoration. This involves 1) a Baseline Assessment of local ecosystem biodiversity before restoration occurs, and 2) Monitoring Surveys after restoration occurs to compare Biodiversity Uplift inside and outside the restoration project. Biodiversity is measured using a “basket-of-metrics” approach commonly used by ecologists. Biodiversity Uplift will be reported along a “Biodiversity Spectrum” that will be created using data from nearby Reference Sites for pristine and highly degraded ecosystems.
SeaTrees Biodiversity Blocks issued under this protocol are stewardship credits: they represent the unit of work done to restore biodiversity. Typically, the unit of work will be one outplant: each mangrove seedling planted, each coral fragment secured to the reef, each kelp spore bag deployed. We believe this approach avoids the challenge of finding a common unit for biodiversity itself. Buyers intuitively understand what it means to pay for a tree to be planted, rather than pay for an obtuse quantification of biodiversity with abstract units.
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