EMFF joins the Strategic Alliance for Biodiversity Markets
At Climate Week NYC 2025, together with Biodiversity Intelligence and Cercarbono, we announced a strategic alliance aimed at accelerating the development of high-integrity biodiversity markets worldwide. This collaboration focuses on the co-development of the Biodiversity Intelligence Methodology (BIM) and on supporting projects that promote ecosystem conservation and restoration across different territories.
The Biodiversity Intelligence Methodology (BIM)
The BIM is a rigorous scientific framework designed to measure, monitor, and manage the impact of projects on biodiversity and ecosystems. Its distinctiveness lies in two pioneering indicators:
- Biodiversity Performance Status (BPS): Assesses the ecological integrity of a project area by comparing it to reference ecosystems.
- Nature Integrity Score (NIS): Integrates BPS values to produce a single, comparable metric that enables biodiversity monitoring over time.
Through these instruments, restoration, sustainable production, and infrastructure projects can quantify tangible outcomes, optimize management strategies, and issue biodiversity credits grounded in scientific evidence.
Why it matters to financial institutions
The BIM does more than measure biodiversity—it creates a direct bridge to capital markets. Its application:
- Generates new financial assets: Scientifically backed biodiversity credits representing measurable ecological gains.
- Opens emerging markets: Positions banks, funds, and institutions as leaders in a rapidly growing sector driven by the demand for nature-based solutions.
- Improves risk management: By assessing BPS and NIS, it enables the identification of environmental risks and supports safer investment decisions.
- Facilitates sustainability compliance: Provides verifiable instruments to align financial strategies with environmental goals.
- Strengthens trust and reputation: Investing in projects with positive social, environmental, and economic outcomes reinforces leadership among stakeholders and markets.
The BIM thus serves as a tool to turn biodiversity conservation and restoration into real, measurable, and high-integrity investment opportunities.
Our role as safeguards observers
Within this alliance, EMFF acts as a technical observer and safeguards coordinator. Our role is to ensure that projects applying the BIM fully comply with the social, governance, and environmental standards required for the issuance of high-integrity biodiversity credits.
This oversight will be conducted in alignment with leading international safeguard frameworks, applying a territorial and community-based approach: each verification process is grounded in a rigorous analysis of local contexts and community priorities.
In doing so, we help guarantee that biodiversity credits are legitimate, reliable, and socially accepted, reinforcing confidence among both investors and society at large.
The Road to Belém
Our current work builds upon a journey that began at COP28 in Dubai, where we supported Cercarbono in launching its Biodiversity Program and Savimbo’s first methodology in the Colombian Amazon. Earlier this year, Savimbo announced the issuance of its first certified biodiversity credits, a milestone confirming the tangible progress of this shared agenda.
Today, in partnership with Biodiversity Intelligence, we are advancing the implementation of the BIM through pilot projects in Seville and southern Spain, while assessing its application to new initiatives in Catalonia.
The upcoming COP30 in Belém, marking ten years since the Paris Agreement, will be a defining moment to reaffirm our conviction: integrity and safeguards compliance are the foundation upon which trustworthy biodiversity markets will be built—capable of channeling capital toward real, measurable solutions.
At EMFF, we work to ensure that environmental markets are fair, transparent, and effective.
The Biodiversity Intelligence Methodology represents a decisive step in that direction—a bridge between science, communities, and investment, transforming conservation into tangible action.
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