India can show how biodiversity-rich economies move from debate to functioning nature markets. COP17 should be the moment for the Global South to turn biodiversity credits from principle into transactions.
As countries prepare for CBD COP17 in Yerevan, biodiversity finance risks becoming trapped in a familiar conversation: the world needs more money for nature, public finance is inadequate, private capital must participate, and safeguards are essential. But for India and much of the Global South, the more urgent question is simpler: where is India’s functioning biodiversity market?
The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for mobilising at least $200 billion annually for biodiversity by 2030 and recognises biodiversity credits among innovative financing instruments. Yet biodiversity-rich developing countries still depend overwhelmingly on public programmes, grants and conventional development finance. If private capital is expected to contribute meaningfully, countries cannot spend another five years discussing biodiversity markets. They need to start creating them.
India Already Has Much of the Architecture
India is well placed to move early. It already has the National Biodiversity Authority, State Biodiversity Boards and Biodiversity Management Committees, while People’s Biodiversity Registers provide locally grounded ecological information. India has also operationalised the Green Credit Programme for tree plantation and eco-restoration, creating experience with registration, monitoring and credit issuance.
This is not yet a biodiversity-credit market, but India need not start from scratch. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, working with the National Biodiversity Authority, should launch a National Biodiversity Credit Market pilot focused initially on mangroves, wetlands, degraded forests, grasslands and biodiversity-rich agricultural landscapes.
Projects could establish an ecological baseline, implement conservation or restoration interventions, demonstrate measurable improvement and generate credits after independent verification. Buyers could include Indian companies, financial institutions and businesses seeking credible nature-positive contributions or biodiversity improvements within supply chains. That would convert biodiversity finance from an abstract commitment into investable projects.
Create Demand, Not Just Credits
Supply alone will not create a market. India must build demand at the same time.
The nascent global market already offers a warning. Climate Policy Initiative estimated in January 2026 that less than $2 million in voluntary biodiversity credits had been traded worldwide, generated by only a handful of projects. Supply is emerging, but corporate purchasing remains subdued. The bottleneck is therefore not simply how to create credits, but how to create credible reasons to buy them.
India could begin with a voluntary contribution market linked to corporate sustainability and supply-chain strategies rather than immediately constructing a large offset market. Companies dependent on agriculture, water, forestry, mining, infrastructure or tourism could finance verified biodiversity gains. Financial institutions could incorporate biodiversity contributions into sustainability-linked products, while businesses could invest in ecological recovery within sourcing landscapes through insetting.
An agricultural company could finance pollinator habitats, wetlands and ecological corridors within its sourcing geography. Coastal businesses could support verified mangrove recovery; mining companies could finance biodiversity improvements beyond mandatory rehabilitation. Such transactions would create something biodiversity finance urgently needs: a visible price signal for ecological improvement.
The Global South Must Build the Market
The opportunity extends beyond India. Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa and other biodiversity-rich countries face the same choice: wait for methodologies, registries and buyer rules to be designed elsewhere, or build domestic markets first and later make them interoperable.
Biodiversity is not globally fungible. A mangrove, grassland, wetland and tropical forest cannot be reduced to one interchangeable unit. Global South countries should therefore develop methodologies suited to their own ecosystems rather than importing carbon-market architecture wholesale. India could develop approaches for mangroves, wetlands, grasslands, forests and agricultural mosaics; African countries could build models for savannas, rangelands and community conservancies. Common principles for measurement, verification and buyer claims could later allow international investment while keeping ecological accounting locally grounded.
Domestic registries, scientific institutions and verification capacity would also help biodiversity-rich countries retain more of the financial value generated by these markets rather than remaining merely suppliers of ecological assets.
Do Not Wait for a Perfect Market
Integrity matters, but the pursuit of perfect rules must not become an excuse for inaction. The safeguards are clear: credits must represent additional and measurable ecological improvement; outcomes cannot be sold twice; credits cannot become a licence for unrestricted destruction elsewhere; and communities generating biodiversity value must receive a transparent share of revenues.
These safeguards should be built while markets are being piloted, not debated indefinitely before the first transaction takes place.
COP17 gives the Global South an opportunity to change the biodiversity-finance conversation. Developing countries should ask not only how much finance they will receive, but how they can create investable ecological assets, domestic demand and functioning nature-finance markets of their own.
India should be among the first movers. The breakthrough will come when restoring a wetland or mangrove produces both a measurable ecological outcome and an identifiable financial return. The Global South holds much of the world’s biodiversity. It should not remain merely its custodian while others build the financial architecture around it.
COP17 should mark the transition from discussing biodiversity credits to actually creating biodiversity markets.
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