Concevoir des crédits Nature: un cadre pour promouvoir la biodiversité et les services écosystémiques

– emphasises that nature credits can only complement – and never replace – ambitious public funding, binding regulation and enforcement, which remain the cornerstone of biodiversity protection; underlines that nature credit schemes must fully respect the precautionary principle and ecological limits;

– calls for public registries, local governance, and binding environmental and social safeguards, and the effective involvement of the public at all stages of the design, implementation and evaluation of nature credit projects;

– stresses that regions and municipalities play a key role in setting and implementing environmental objectives, as they are in the areas where ecosystem changes occur and where practical know-how for ecosystem conservation and restoration is concentrated; calls for sufficient public resources and technical assistance to ensure that subnational authorities can lead on ecological conservation and restoration with support from the private sector;

– calls on the European Commission to develop a phased and adaptive EU framework for nature credits;

– proposes that the framework be based on the principles of environmental integrity, ex post verification of achieved outcomes, transparency and independent auditing;

– underlines that the proposed framework should align with existing legislative instruments such as the Environmental Accounting Framework, the EU Taxonomy, the Green Claims Directive and the EU biodiversity directives and the Nature Restoration Regulation, as well as the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation; stresses the need for legal clarity to prevent nature credits from undermining the EU’s regulatory framework or weakening environmental ambition;

– expresses its readiness to cooperate and actively contribute to the development of an EU policy on nature credit schemes in the context of a new EU expert group on nature credits.