In January 2024, the UK Government enacted legislation that requires the building sector to use nature-based solutions to offset all new buildings to be nature positive.

The large site, typically commercial sector requirements, came into force in February 2024 and the small site, typically residential sector requirements come into force just 3 months later in April 2024. This gives you some idea of the level of perceived urgency behind the legislation. The requirements for biodiversity net gain (BNG), means all new building projects must achieve a 10% net gain in biodiversity or habitat as part of the project outcomes. If an ecosystem is destroyed by a road, for example, another needs to be recreated, either on site or elsewhere.

There are have been numerous multi-lateral biodiversity related policies and agreements generated globally within the last 13 years including in:

• 2010, the UNEP and 196 countries committing to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets;
• 2017, the UN General Assembly endorsed, the ‘UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2030’;
• 2021, the USA’s Present Biden’s ‘Plan to Conserve Global Forests: Carbon Sinks’;
• 2022, the UNEP ‘Nature-based Solutions: Opportunities and Critical Challenges for Scaling Up’;
• 2022, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) A global, market-led initiative with the mission to develop and deliver a risk management and disclosure framework for organisations to report and act on evolving nature-related risks and opportunities; 55F;;
• 2022, the UN Biodiversity Conference or COP15 Summit;
• 2023, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework signed by 190 countries.

The Australian Government is also seriously redirecting the emphasis on carbon toward dual benefit outcomes using nature-based solutions to achieve both biodiversity restoration and carbon drawdown from the atmosphere, to simultaneously restore nature and climate, because both issues, as negative impacts, or net-positive benefits, affect the outcomes of the other. Here are just a few of the major current actions taken by Government.

In 2023, Australia joined the 190 other nations to sign the global the Montreal Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework, that among other things, commits signatories to restoring 30% of natural systems by 2030 as a minimum. The 4 key goals include; biodiversity conservation and restoration, nature’s contribution to people, access and benefit sharing and tools and solutions for mainstreaming and implementation.

The newly adopted framework will now set the global and as a signatory, Australia’s biodiversity action agenda for the next decade, including:

• halting the extinction of known threatened species and significantly reduce extinction risk (Goal A);
• ensuring at least 30% of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine ecosystems are under effective restoration (Target 2);
• ensuring at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas are effectively conserved and managed (Target 3);
• reducing the rates of introduction and establishment of other known or potential invasive alien species by at least 50%, by 2030 (Target 6);
• reducing pollution risks and impacts of pollution from all sources to prevent harmful impacts on biodiversity (Target 7);
• minimising the impact of climate change and ocean acidification on biodiversity (Target 8);
• mainstreaming biodiversity into decision-making across government and business (Targets 14 and 15).

The Australian Government consequently enacted the Nature Repair Act 2023 (the Act) that came into effect on 15 December 2023. The Act establishes a framework for a world-first legislated, national, voluntary biodiversity market. It is intended to mobilise private finance by creating a Biodiversity Market to fund repair and protection of our unique natural environments by creation of a Biodiversity Certificate that operates in the same way carbon certificates have for some time. The Market will allow for a broad range of different types of nature repair, protection and restoration activities, allowing projects to be undertaken on Australian land and waters or a combination of both.

This new Market will ensure the issues that arose with international carbon offset certificates will not be repeated by incorporating requirements that Biodiversity Certificates meet biodiversity integrity standards as defined in the Act. The standards will ensure projects deliver genuine improvements in nature. Biodiversity certificates contain reliable information about these improvements, and each project will have a single tradable certificate. Owners can sell these certificates to buyers under commercial contracts.

Biodiversity Certificates will enable the Market to confidently compare and value these nature-restoring projects and regular project reports will describe and verify the environmental outcomes. Certificates, their status and ownership are already trackable via a public register.

The Clean Energy Regulator is now administering both the Nature Repair Market and the Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). The first combined biodiversity and carbon repair method entitled, the ‘Soil Carbon Farming Method’ was approved by the Regulator in 2023 and the first project registered in late 2023. This method has the potential to be a game changer for agricultural and carbon/biodiversity restoration sectors because for the first time, carbon sequestration does not have to compete with agriculture (or indeed parkland or landscaping) for land area, they can, and do happen simultaneously, and the biodiversity (macro and micro) created, while not necessarily seen, given it happens within the soil, is very real and helps restore biodiversity, topsoil, water and air quality and yields commercial crops, pasture or more beautiful landscapes while also drawing down carbon.

The unsaid outcome here though, is that it is already happening.Projects that issue Biodiversity Certificates will also be issuing Carbon Certificates as biodiversity restoration is the only practical solution to climate restoration that we currently have. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the much vaunted, long-awaited technology to draw carbon from the atmosphere has yet to work anywhere in the work on anything like the scale needed, because only a few pilot plants exist globally and none are operating at a commercially successful level.

Minister Tanya Plibersek has also announced the Government will hold the world’s first Nature Positive Conference to be held in Sydney in October 2024.

So, while restoring the climate with biodiversity repair is the new setting adopted by global and Australian Governments, other organisations have come to the same conclusion.

In 2021 the Green Building Council of Australia identified and defined a reduced carbon and net-zero carbon pathway for buildings through to 2050. This requires building to initially improve operational efficiencies, via design and system selection, then reduced upfront carbon content of building materials and to offset the residual emissions impacts using nature-based solutions so the net-emissions of the project are actually taken back out of the atmosphere over relatively short growth-cycle times.

The solutions they later identified in their “Climate Positive Buildings & our Net Zero Ambitions” publication in 2023 include:

1. Afforestation activities: Afforestation, reforestation and improved forest management, by planting in areas with no woody vegetation in the previous 10 years;
2. Silvopastoral systems: Planting trees in animal-grazing areas;
3. Reducing the impact of logging: Improving the logging activities in a commercial plantation by reducing the impact of the logging;
4. Natural regeneration: Enrichment and/or enhancing of natural regeneration;
5. Live fences: Planting trees as fences;
6. Extending forest age: Extend the rotation age or the cutting cycle of forest plantations;
7. Agroforestry systems: Planting trees with crops;
8. Protecting the forest: Changing the land use of a forest plantation from logged forest to protected forest
9. Improving productivity: Increase the productivity of forest plantation by improvements to management, thinning, fertilisation, etc.

In March 2023 GBCA published their updated ‘Designing with Nature 2.0’ document. This document resulted from extensive consultation with stakeholders from across the built environment sector and identified several clear themes:

• The built environment sector must rapidly move towards nature positive outcomes;
• Collaborative action must occur between government, private and not-for-profit sectors;
• Nature must be viewed as being connected to all other sustainability issues;
• Nature must be considered throughout the built environment’s value chain;
• Indigenous knowledge and ownership must be prioritized;
• All stakeholders must have an opportunity to create positive nature impacts;

Following the issue of this publication, the GBCA announced it was commencing development of a Nature Roadmap for the Built Environment. The roadmap is intended to assist industry make new choices for nature management, and safeguard nature for future generations.

In October 2023, Global GreenTag International operators of the Global GreenTag^CertTM product certification scheme and ECO Platform accredited Global GreenTag EPD Program, launched a ground-breaking, also world-first, NaturePositive+Assessment (NP+A), NaturePositive+Declaration (NP+D) via their NaturePositive+ Product Certification Standard. Together these unique, robust scientific processes, holistically measure both life cycle impacts and benefits, plus circularity of resources, toxicity, biodiversity, ethical supply chains, and social benefit, to assess ‘distance to net zero’ prior to any public disclosure. Then once nature-based offsets are purchased, a final NaturePositive+Rating is delivered depending on whether the manufacturer has determined to become +5% (NP⁺Bronze), +10%(NP⁺Silver), +15%(NP⁺Gold), or +20% (NP⁺Platinum) Nature Positive. The nature-based offsets are selected based on established, and pre-approved standards and confirmed project outcomes, such as those being delivered by the Australian Biodiversity Certificate scheme operated by the Regulator of the ACCU (Australian Carbon Credit Unit) Framework.

While NP+Ds effectively engage manufacturers in nature repair, they also enable those manufacturers engaged in nature repair and/or circular economy practices to measure for the first time ever, the benefits of ‘avoided impacts’ on resources and natural systems by upcycling, refurbishing, recycling and re-using products and materials and even natural systems themselves. Prior to the development of GreenTag’s NP+D that includes the ground-breaking Life Cycle Benefit Assessment (LCBA) developed by the Evah Institute in conjunction with Global GreenTag, natural systems engineered products like wetland wastewater treatment systems, green roofs and green walls could not be fully modelled except for their negative impacts.

Now with LCBA, all benefits and impacts can be quantified for all products and the ‘distance to net zero targets’ should be smaller and therefore offsets less costly. Furthermore, this methodology, that uses traditional LCA methodological approaches, is also used within Global GreenTag’s EPDs and included as a ‘Benefit Addendum’ to each relevant EPD as well as NP+Ds. The good news here is that once a product has both a Product Health Declaration and an EPD, no additional work or information input is required by the manufacturer applicants to achieve an NP+A.

Together, these NP+D processes enable the quantification and reporting of fully circular product loops and natural systems like the wetland treatment systems, green roofs and green walls and even landscaping, trees (one of the most efficient CCS ‘machines’ known to us) or enhanced soil carbon processes including products like biochar, or seeds that come pre-inoculated with local soil microorganisms. These fantastic inoculated microorganisms ingest carbon dioxide and excrete it as carbonate minerals, hence enhancing the natural non-water sensitive, soil carbon binding outcomes that can now create a greater carbon drawdown benefit than has been historically possible.

Our global future human condition is currently uncertain. Our ability to heal our future, lies in us co-creating nature restoration with natural and human systems such as financial models being supported by the voluntary Nature Market legislation.

How we react to it is up to us. If there is significant voluntary uptake, that’s one thing. If not, and denial and ignorance prevail, then while carbon has increasingly become the ‘language of buildings and products’ of late, get set for the continued rapid ramp up of Nature Positive outcomes that already has more momentum than carbon had in the 50 years up to the beginning of 2022, and the big question given our existing international commitments: ‘When (not if) will we see Nature Positive requirements legislated in Australia?’

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