<aside> 🐋 Welcome!
On this page, you can find updates on our progress in developing the Marine Biodiversity Unit for the Marine Biodiversity Credit. We provide a methodology description, research resources, codes, questions, and blocks that we have. We welcome your feedback and ideas on all of these fronts.
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Table of Contents
After publishing the draft framework and white paper for Marine Ecosystem Credit (MEC), we are working on the first credit issuance and methodology: the marine biodiversity credit. We think that to develop a scalable system of marine biodiversity credits, we must first define what the credit unit is.
Our goal is to create a scientifically sound and equitable "global scale" of marine biodiversity that also supports financial efforts for conservation, meaning it must be scalable. To achieve this, we aim to develop a metric that incorporates the ecological values of the ecosystems within each acreage—or 1 km$^2$—of ocean protected. Thus, we define a Base Unit (BU) as a unit per square kilometer.
In the following example a BU =1 unit, but should be scaled up to orders of magnitude (like 100 or 1000 units) to account for decimal points in subsequent calculations.
We have considered two theoretical approaches for calculating biodiversity credits and determining the underlying unit. Approach A has a more global focus, as it relies on globally available datasets. In contrast, Approach B is more locally focused and depends on specific local conservation strategies. We are reviewing the merits and limitations of both approaches to decide which one our official methodology should propose. Alternatively, we may consider a hybrid approach that combines elements of both.
The following methodological approaches are currently being designed and reviewed:
The feasibility of these projects strongly depends on the ability to measure biodiversity effectively, robustly, and cost-effectively according to the defined metrics. However, measuring biodiversity can be a daunting task even for small swathes of marine ecosystems, and only certain regions can be effectively sampled. To address this issue, models must be used to interpolate between sampling sites and regions where sampling is not possible. To achieve this, we need different models, such as a model of models, to represent the ecosystem health of project sites. An example is shown below:
All models are wrong, but some are useful