Episode 639 - Eleanor Harris || Understanding Biodiversity Credits For Conservation

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Origins Foundation Podcast

Episode 639 - Eleanor Harris || Understanding Biodiversity Credits For Conservation
Date: April 21, 2026
Host: The Origins Foundation
Guest: Dr. Eleanor Harris

---

Overview

This episode explores the emerging world of biodiversity credits and their role in conservation and sustainable land management. Host "B" interviews Eleanor Harris, a Scottish historian-turned-environmental policy researcher and biodiversity credits expert. The conversation delves into the challenge of valuing biodiversity, the mechanisms of credit schemes, historical context, practical implementation, and future prospects for biodiversity credits globally. The discussion is particularly relevant to the hunting and conservation community, examining real-world opportunities and hurdles in creating meaningful and fair biodiversity incentive systems.

---

Episode Structure and Key Discussion Points

1. Setting the Context for Biodiversity Credits

[00:30–05:25]

• The host’s interest in finding mechanisms that value habitat, recapping the “seven tools” for habitat protection (parks, regenerative agriculture, philanthropy, hunting, ecotourism, carbon credits, biodiversity credits).
• Eleanor Harris is introduced as an emerging expert on biodiversity credits, with a background in history, creativity, and environmental advocacy.
• Main theme introduced: how biodiversity credits could become a vital new part of the conservation toolkit, with parallels drawn to the early days of carbon offsets.

“Biodiversity credits...it’s a very new, very new sector that is just like carbon 15 years ago, nobody was talking about it. Who knows what’s going to look like in 15 years?” – Host (00:30)

2. Eleanor Harris’s Background and Path to Conservation

[05:25–15:42]

• Harris’s upbringing in Scotland with a love for nature, influenced by childhood TV and her amateur naturalist parents.
• Academic background in Scottish history, with later switches to environmental advocacy and policy.
• The “aha” moment connecting economic development, environmental policy, and historical patterns—a realization that sparked her shift to working in forestry and natural capital.

“[Forestry] was all complete news to me and I was completely captivated. I was like, this is the answer. This is how we can get to an economic tipping point and not die.” – Eleanor Harris (13:30)

3. Natural Capital, Forestry, and Challenges of Valuation

[15:42–19:04]

• Harris discusses teaming up with a forester and entering the sustainability policy world.
• Introduction to the concept of "natural capital" as a way to bridge economic valuation and ecological importance.
• The exploding but confusing market space of natural capital and environmental finance: the promise, pitfalls, and proliferation of questionable initiatives.

“The broad hope is that nature is going to become something that makes money. If you restore nature, if you save the rainforest, you get paid for it. How do you make that work in practice? Well, it’s very difficult...” – Eleanor Harris (17:20)

4. Biodiversity and Carbon: Comparing Credit Approaches

[21:33–23:49]

• Host describes the traditional and new mechanisms for funding and valuing habitat, including the new "tools" of carbon and biodiversity credits.
• Harris explains that while carbon credits are already operational (though not without issues), biodiversity credits are far more complex to measure and standardize due to their multidimensional nature.

“Biodiversity is so much more three dimensional, 15 dimensional. What are you measuring? How are you measuring it? How do you compare destruction over here to restoration over there?” – Eleanor Harris (21:48)

5. Case Study: Biodiversity Credits in Practice in England

[23:00–25:21]

• Real-world example: England’s biodiversity net gain policy already requires developers to use habitat metrics and offset habitat losses by funding restoration elsewhere, managed through 30-year contracts.
• Opportunities for farmers to sell biodiversity units, but limited to those in the right places and facing logistical/legal hurdles.

“It does enable a farmer who lives near a place where houses are being built can say, well, I’ve got an opportunity to deliver you habitat units... and can sell them.” – Eleanor Harris (24:51)

6. What Is Biodiversity? Values, Conflicts, and Measurement

[27:13–34:09]

• Debate over what counts as valuable biodiversity; differences in local government definitions, historical landscapes, and native vs. non-native species.
• The fundamentally value-laden nature of biodiversity protection—whether we aim for historical authenticity, maximize uniqueness (curlew example vs. woodland), or target abundance.

"It comes down to whether people prefer wandering in woodland or prefer watching curlew. And it’s very difficult to do it in an impartial basis." – Eleanor Harris (32:15)

7. Metrics and Monitoring: The Difficulty of Good Data

[34:09–37:01]

• The challenge of balancing robust, comprehensive measurement with practical, affordable monitoring.
• Technological solutions (like automated bird audio monitoring with apps such as Merlin) are promising, scalable tools.

“You can essentially stick recorders around your site and... have loads of data on what birds are out there. You can analyze it using AI... and quite quickly and cheaply you can get a really good rich picture.” – Eleanor Harris (36:15)

8. Scale, Land Use, and the Role of Hunting

[37:22–43:08]

• Discussion of scaling up biodiversity credits, from UK farmland to vast landscapes like in Tanzania.
• The role hunting plays as a practical management tool where natural predators are absent; Harris reflects on evolving her views from urban suspicion to appreciation for rural wisdom.
• Real-world relationships between species and habitats, including unanticipated effects (e.g., “fewer deer = fewer midges = fewer birds”).

“His knowledge of forest is very good at understanding habitat, three dimensional habitat. But he understood the relationships between animals, the wild animals and the birds and the domestic animals and the insects... I’d never heard those relationships explained before by all the academics.” – Eleanor Harris (41:50)

9. Outreach, Education, and Shifting Perceptions

[43:08–44:56]

• The importance of experiential learning and challenging preconceptions both around hunting and land management.
• The limits of academic models compared to boots-on-the-ground knowledge.

“Not that you’ve become a hunter, but at the end of the day you will say, I still don’t like it, but I understand it now.” – Host (44:02)

10. Funding, Policy, and the Path Forward

[46:03–48:39]

• Discussion of societal willingness to pay for biodiversity, likened to the normalization of health and safety investments.
• The need for both voluntary markets and public sector policy (governments, companies) to realize global biodiversity targets (e.g., “30 by 30”).
• Harris’ optimism that biodiversity credits can replicate the growth path of carbon credits (with faster learning), while remaining realistic about risks and the need for early preparation.

“I think biodiversity credits are going to start to emerge. I’m quite optimistic that they’ll follow the path of carbon credits, and we’ve learned they can follow it faster in many ways, because we’ve learned now what makes a good, robust carbon credit.” – Eleanor Harris (49:04)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Defining Biodiversity:
  "Everyone's talking about it. That's different... Is it about habitat, species, how do you measure it?" – Eleanor Harris (28:07)

• On Value-Laden Nature:
  "People value biodiversity in emotional ways, so they're not always... So that if you ask people in Scotland which are their favorite natural places... they'll often pick, oh, I really like that one. That looks lovely. And you say, well, that's actually all non native species..." – Eleanor Harris (32:15)

• On Data Collection Innovation:
  "One I like is birds, because you can now... stick recorders around your site and set it up to be running something like the Merlin app... and quite quickly and cheaply you can get a really good rich picture." – Eleanor Harris (36:15)

• Land Management Wisdom:
  “But his knowledge of forest is very good at understanding habitat, three dimensional habitat. But he understood the relationships between animals...” – Eleanor Harris (41:50)

---

Important Timestamps

• [00:30] — Introduction to biodiversity credits as new conservation tools.
• [05:25] — Eleanor Harris’s background and entry into conservation.
• [13:30] — Discovery of forestry and its importance.
• [17:20] — The confusion and complexity of early biodiversity finance schemes.
• [21:48] — Challenges in measuring and creating biodiversity credits vs. carbon credits.
• [23:00] — Explanation of England’s biodiversity offset policy.
• [32:15] — The value-laden debate around what biodiversity to prioritize.
• [36:15] — The use of the Merlin app and audio monitoring as promising biodiversity metrics.
• [41:50] — Real-world effects of land management, deer, and midges in Scotland.
• [49:04] — Predictions for the next 10 years in biodiversity credits.

---

Additional Resources Mentioned

• Operation Wallacea: Innovative group working on multifaceted biodiversity metrics and monitoring (find at operationwallacea.org).
• Merlin Bird ID App: Powerful tool for acoustic monitoring of bird species diversity (merlin.allaboutbirds.org).

---

Contact & Further Information

• Eleanor Harris:
  Find her on LinkedIn (“Eleanor M. Harris”)

---

Summary

This episode offers a nuanced, insider look at how biodiversity credits are taking shape, their parallels to the carbon market, the persistent difficulties in measuring and valuing “nature,” and the practical, political, and cultural hurdles to scaling new conservation finance tools. Harris’s reflections move fluidly across landscape history, economic theory, ecological measurement, and real-world experimentation, providing practical insight and cautious optimism for listeners in the conservation and hunting communities.

Transcript

[A]

Planning a fishing trip shouldn't feel like a full time job. With fishingbooker.com you can find and book the perfect fishing trip within minutes. FishingBooker.com connects you with trusted fishing captains around the world. Booking is fast, easy and secure with access to verified customer reviews, loyalty rewards and around the clock customer support. Everything you need to book with confidence is in one place. So head to fishingbooker.com and start planning your next fishing fishing adventure today.

[B]

Eleanor Harris is a academic tied in with the Biodiversity Credit initiative. I have gotten interested in understanding what is going to value habitat around this world. And you've heard me say this. There's typically only seven things that will actually do that, one of which, the new kid on the block essentially is biodiversity credits, Biodiversity credit schemes. What is biodiversity credit schemes? How do you measure it? How is it going to be worked in the landscape? All of these questions I have. And so a previous podcast guest, Stefan Reinbek, connected me with Eleanor Harris and that's who's on today's podcast. Eleanor really has become an expert in this biodiversity field. She's from Scotland and I just want to have an initial conversation with her about biodiversity, biodiversity credits and the scheme itself. It turns out it's a very new, very new sector that is just like carbon 15 years ago, nobody was talking about it. Who knows what's going to look like in 15 years? So enjoy the podcast. Let it stir some questions in your brain. So enjoy. So five years ago, there was a reason why I started this movement. And the truth then is the truth now that we need to champion our narrative. We need to champion the truth around what we do and who we are. There's a sweet spot with a gun, you know, too heavy and it's a burden to walk with. Too light and you whipping it. Why is the project so important to the hunting community? It's. It's a. I think it's not only important, I think it's. I think it's vital. I think it's, it's just in time. It's like snakes and ladders. You guys are climbing the ladder and then somebody does something stupid and you just slide that. That is such an amazing analogy. Snakes and ladders.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, ivory in, in my opinion, was the plastic of its age. Okay.

[C]

The expensive little going up.

[B]

It goes a long way with families.

[C]

We are families that do need it.

[B]

Let me close this door because I have a little wiener dog. What you. Are you laughing because I said wiener?

[C]

I'm really glad you finished the sentence out. I'M sorry, the first happen. What are we doing here today?

[B]

You're telling the whole. Everyone I. When I say good morning through these podcast forums, they're like, morning. I always speak to the United Kingdom, Africa, whatnot, early mornings because I'm. I'm an early bird. I like waking up super early. 4:30 typically is when I wake up, but it's lunchtime there. On your time?

[C]

Yeah, I just had lunch.

[B]

So you're in the. You're in England.

[C]

I'm in Scotland.

[B]

Scotland. And the sun is shining.

[C]

It looks like it is, yeah. More or less. Yes. It was shining. It's just gone by the cloud. But it's quite bright. I've got a nice bright room and I'm looking out, I'm in the sort of middle, fairly near the middle of Edinburgh, looking at Arthur's Seat, which is the mountain that we have in the middle of Edinburgh. And it's. It's not that warm, but at least it's sunny.

[B]

Well, it's winter here too. We're on the same place, so it's really cold. Actually in Memphis, Tennessee right now, that's below freezing. So, yeah, it's good. We need, we need below freezing conditions here.

[C]

Yeah, well, it's. It tends to be sort of about 6 degrees and damp it in Scotland in the winter. And I've heard I never go on holiday to cold places because I get enough of that in Scotland. But people who go to other cold places say that it always feels colder in Scotland because it's damp.

[B]

Hilarious.

[C]

We all catch lots more colds, but I've sort of lent into the winter and discovered as long as I sleep, go and sort of go a winter sort of pace, there's lots to enjoy. And I recently started scuba diving, which is amazing. And that's really good because it's just as good all year round. So you can.

[B]

Amazing. Amazing. Well, Eleanor Harris, welcome to the Origins foundation podcast. I'm super excited about this conversation and before we go on, I'd like to obviously acknowledge and give a shout out to Stefan, who was the initiator of us connecting. Yeah. Forestry link. But, you know, he started talking about things that I know very little about. And I tend to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But this specific topic, I have no. Like, I know just enough to be dangerous and even less than I need to be dangerous. And I've always just been fascinated on it. Before we talk about what that is, please introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

[C]

Well, I'm a definite jack of all trades. I started out as a historian, studied, was a bookish sort of child and studied history and did a PhD in Scottish church history in the 19th century.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So that proved a very good basis for working in the rural economy. But, well, my other strand, well, I've got perhaps three strands, really. Another strand is I'm quite creative, so I do quite a lot of drawing and painting and writing and. Yeah, that comes into all sorts of things. SINGING and then the third strand is I've always been passionate about the environment. I think I probably got this from a children's television show when I was very small, Blue Peter. British listeners will remember Blue Peter, which is this wonderful children's magazine program. And I think it was featuring the environmental crisis. And my parents were very much amateur naturalists and would, you know, love to. Love to go and identify flowers and visit wild places. And I discovered that these wild places were in danger and decided I was going to save them all.

[B]

And so what was the rhetoric being championed through. Through that? That was like. You were like this. Dire consequences and endangerment. What was being peddled?

[C]

Well, I think what I picked up was chiefly sort of habitat destruction. It was kind of before climate change. This is the 1980s, so climate change was known about, but it wasn't really on the mainstream agenda. Acid rain from cars was a big thing. So I had a very anti car phase, had that habitat destruction. I was going to save the rainforests and protect habitats and that's probably about as far as I got in childhood. And then as I was. Yeah, and then went off to do history. And so all that rainforest wildlife stuff was very childish. But then towards the end of my history degree, I knew about climate change by this time, but it was sort of over there somewhere. And I was becoming a historian and one of the lecturers mentioned something about. Oh, he's talking about economic tipping points.

[B]

It is 2026 and my friends, big changes have happened in the world of firearms suppressors. The $200 tax stamp fee is now gone. Huge win for hunters, huge win for shooters and a huge win for your wallets. If you're thinking about elevating your shooting experience and adding a suppressor. Silence Essential is the best way to shop. And you don't even have to get off your couch to do it. Go to silenceessential.com, browse hundreds of suppressor options. They literally have all of the popular makes and models. Then their experts will walk you through setting up your account, creating a free NFA trust, and then submitting your application to the atf. Once approved, Silencer Central ships your new suppressor directly to your door. That's when you're going to have to essentially get off the couch. It's a game changer, guys. If you haven't done it yet, do it. The old days of waiting eight to 10 months on a suppressor are gone. It's more like two weeks. Some have even gotten their suppressors in shorter timeframes. It's never been easier to start shooting suppressed. Get started today by visiting silencercentral.com it's really the simplest way to get your suppressors. Bushnell is eager to help you get set up for conservation success. That's right, they want to help you. The conservation and research community is dominated by good people doing good things and investing significant time and effort for the benefit of habitat and the species. So what do you need to do? Pretty simple. Send us your conservation story and or your conservation wish. Could be managing whitetails, could be understanding your environment or species or something else related to conservation. What would you be able to do if you had a great trail camera setup? We will select the best story every other month and send you a camera bundle, cell camera, normal SD camera, SD cards, as well as optics. Everything you need to get set up for success. I can't wait to see what you submit. You can email us, DM us, message us, whatever you want. We are not hard to find. Good luck.

[C]

And he was illustrating a point about Britain in the 19th century. But he said, for example, an economic tipping point around now, and this was 2001, is that the average middle class person in China is about to be able to afford to buy a car. And he paused for a moment and he said, and then we're all going to die. And it kind of joined, joined dots in my head. It was hyperbolizing, but it joined dots in my head between what I've been studying and economic development, history of societies and things and all that wildlife stuff I'd been doing as a child. And I thought, oh yeah, this is actually, this isn't just, just not cutting down the rainforest. This is sort of at the heart of who we are and what we're doing and how we're all going to live on this planet in the future. And yeah, so then I had, well, I. But what do we do about it? And I had a few jobs working for wildlife charities and was quite interested in advocacy and getting people engaged. I'm very much a city person. So getting people to care about this stuff and care about nature and believe in climate change and start thinking about the problem. But I could tell it wasn't, you know, I wasn't going to get anywhere like this and then threw a friend at a party or it was somebody's plus one at a party. I said, what do you do? He said, I'm a forester. And I said, oh, well, I didn't know what, I wasn't sure what to say because I'd never, I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't.

[B]

I thought, well, was that a surprise? Because when that was the whole genesis of my conversation with Stefan was like this. This idea to me of a forester in England seems counterintuitive, especially like in Scotland, for instance. Everyone thinks Scotland, open meadows, big mountains, not a tree in sight.

[C]

We do have, yeah, we have the, one of the lowest tree covers in Europe. Scotland has a bit more than England. We've got about 20% forest cover. But Europe it's more like.

[B]

And historically you're a historian, so let's just dive in down that rabbit hole. Historically, was Scotland wooded a long time ago?

[C]

Yes, a lot of it was, but not for. So I guess we have got a very short ecology in Scotland because the ice only retreated 10,000 years ago and people were here already. So there was no original wild pre human nature. Humans were part of our ecosystem as it is from the beginning. And, but, and this is getting into history that I don't know a huge amount about. But broadly speaking, as the ice retreating, the trees came along and then of course the English Channel opened up and we became an island, by which time only about 35 tree species had made it in. So there's a whole lot of trees that are indigenous to Europe that have, that are not indigenous to the United Kingdom because they didn't, they didn't make it across the ice.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

But many of which humans are brought subsequently and, and so where do you draw the line? Was it, you know, if the humans brought them over land after the ice age, does that count? But if they bring them in the 16th century or the 19th century, that doesn't count.

[B]

Yeah. What's naturalized, what isn't naturalized?

[C]

So we have a lot of discussions about trees and native species, but yeah, we've got about 35 native tree species, but they would have covered very large proportion of United Kingdom.

[B]

So why was the forester that you met surprising to you?

[C]

Because it's a very little known profession in, in the uk. So I didn't know much about rural economy at All Scotland. Scotland is. We've got a lot of countryside, but we've got. All our population is concentrated in a very small area and if you live in that area, you can be completely disconnected from farming and forestry and everything going on out there. And I just not really thought about how all that. Well, I knew about farming, but I hadn't thought about how other bits of land were managed and you see forests as you drive around. And in fact, a lot of my childhood holidays were spent in a wonderful forest that I subsequently discovered was planted and managed and didn't just come there by itself, it was there by intention. But I didn't know that there were foresters who did this. So I started asking him about, what do you do and what's that involved? And he started telling me about sustainable forest management and timber growing and growing timber to build houses and that captures carbon and the UK's low forest cover and creating. A lot of the forests have been created as timber plantations. But then the environmental problems that came from that when it was first done, and the development of the UK Forestry Standard and FSC certification and how we kind of had to get. Because we were creating so much forest, UK had to really get on top of doing it responsibly. We weren't managing existing forest, we were taking open land and creating forest. And, yeah, this was all complete news to me and I was completely captivated. I was like, this is the answer. This is how we can get to an economic tipping point and not die. We can do all the things, we can save the rainforest, except, well, we have sort of rainforest in the uk, we can recreate those forests and, and we can build our houses and stop using.

[B]

And you can do it all sustainably and.

[C]

Yeah, and it can be. This is a solution. So I leaned in, learned everything I could about it.

[B]

You leaned in heavy?

[C]

Yeah. Once I get interested in something, I get really interested and sometimes it's a phase, but so far, forestry is 10 years in and it's not a phase yet. It's still going. Going strong and that. I got a job working at the UK forestry trade association, confor, as a policy researcher because they were starting to look more at sustainability again. Well, it kind of comes around in cycles. They were, they. They were being asked by government to look at sustainability and talk more about climate and biodiversity. Those discourses were all getting updated and so I did quite a lot of work for them on researching forests and biodiversity, forests and carbon. And. Yeah, that was, that was really good. Meanwhile, with the same friend that I Met at the party. He got interested in natural capital as this concept of this methodology for joining these dots together. Instead of having economy on one side, biodiversity on the other, and the two have nothing to say to each other, how do we start to value biodiversity? How do we start to talk about the importance of biodiversity to the economy and underpinning human society in terms that everyone can understand? And he was a bit involved in that. He got me involved and I thought, this is really useful, there's a lot in this. And it kind of chimed with that historical thinking. And then that led to my present role, which is doing natural capital for a land agency in Scotland and northern England and investigating what does this mean, where's this going? It's all emerging. The broad hope is that nature is going to become something that makes money. If you restore nature, if you save the rainforest, you get paid for it. How do you make that work in practice? Well, it's very difficult and there's a lot of people saying, we want to make this work, let's make this work, let's create some mechanisms to make it work, let's fund some work to make it work. So there's a whole industry now, amazing, developing this. But the problem with the whole industry of experimental stuff no one knows about is an awful lot of confusion. Cowboys, red herrings, black holes, gravy, trains, loot, coals. And so sorting out what can we do, you know, what's actually going to make that difference, what's going to be impactful, how do we have systems that people can't game? And whether people are cynical or doing it for the right reasons, everyone's coming at it from their own perspective and with their own interests. So it's, yeah, it's a very complicated and confusing world. And after a few years in it, I suddenly discover that becoming an expert, there's a shortage of experts. And so it's more and more interesting to me explaining it to, or explaining where we're at, to people who are discussing.

[B]

Well, that's exactly what led us to being connected, is I had a chat with Stefan. Obviously, Stefan talked about forestry economics, sort of debunked a couple of things that I thought about from a forestry perspective, that it's not the boogeyman, it's not the bad kid on the block. However, as that conversation went forward, obviously from our perspective, our community's perspective, we're very much interested in the sustainability of wildlife, the sustainability of habitat. So are you. And then the biggest question behind that is, well, how do we make that Happen we, me, my community, live in the hunting space. Hunting being one of those economic, natural, dare I say, natural capital mechanisms by which we value wildlife, we value habitats, and those funds that are generated through that activity are utilized to protect that habitat. However, now we have new tools on the block. And when you saw, when I say new tools, I mean carbon biodiversity, which in my brain, I've looked at this and thought about it a lot. There's only really seven tools at our disposal to protect habitat in this world. You have wilderness areas that are your classic tundras, your forests, right? You have your state parks, your national parks, your wildlife management areas. Those are protected by government, state government kind of things. You've got some sort of regenerative agriculture, whether that's also regenerative forestry, that has elements of wildlife built into it. You've got your philanthropic model, which is people donating to protect areas, that's their value. You've got hunting, which is number five. You've got ecotourism, your photographic tourism, which is number six and your number seven tool in your toolbox. And we could split it in seven and eight is carbon credits and biodiversity credits. Carbon is in the ground right now in terms of its functionality from value. Is biodiversity yet being used as. This is it. This is what we're talking about. You're the biodiversity credits. You said it yourself, expert in an experimental field,

[C]

then you certainly be very difficult to go out and make some biodiversity credits and sell them just like that. We've had a look at this.

[B]

Why is that so difficult? Let me ask that as a basic question. Why can't that happen just like that?

[C]

Well, even doing that with carbon is pretty difficult. One problem of biodiversity is it's all challenges of carbon. I'm sure you have heard of stories of jumped carbon offsets and greenwashing and the whole carbon offsetting framework has developed, got rapidly on a kind of curve of growing rigor to, to sort out, shift, sift out the valid impactful carbon projects from the junk ones. Biodiversity is so much more three dimensional, 15 dimensional. What are you measuring? How are you measuring it? How do you compare destruction over here to restoration over there? What are you offsetting? It's a much harder project.

[B]

Is it? Is it me? Is it? Is. Is the credit system for in your mind, from a biodiversity perspective, are we looking at it like a wetland mitigation scheme, Like a wetland mitigation bank? Are people saying I'm taking away from biodiversity over here and so I have to pay my credits and buy my credits over here?

[C]

That's definitely a one, one model. That's a model that's. So that is established in England, not in Scotland, but in England, there's a framework where developers building houses have to use a metric to measure the habitats, really habitat, not all biodiversity, which also includes. So you could have interesting habitat devoid of wildlife, but it's habitat that's destroyed during the development. And then they have to demonstrate 10% uplift by either on the site or out with the site, creating and enhancing habitat to some degree to mitigate the damage of the development. So that's one form of biodiversity credit.

[B]

So that is in place already. Like, there are people in England saying biodiversity is one thing that we want to mitigate for.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So. And I know there's similar things in other countries, but this is the one I know about for the last two or three years. It's still pretty new and it's run by local government, so it's on a quite small scale. So you have to put your biodiversity quite close to where you're losing it. And there's a quite sophisticated metric developed by Natural England, who are the English Government Nature Authority. And, yeah, you use this metric calculator, you get an ecologist, professional ecologist will come and survey it and it's registered on a national register. And then you have to manage that habitat for 30 years. The proof will be in the pudding because, as I say, we've only had two or three years of it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

But it does enable a farmer who lives near a place where houses are being built can say, well, I've got an opportunity to deliver you habitat units. And say the farmer can rewild a, plant hedgerows or enhance a river and create units and can sell them.

[B]

And he's being incentivized to keep his habitat, sustain his habitat and potentially grow, restore, rehabilitate. Rehabilitate his habitats.

[C]

Yeah. And then they'll be in a contract for 30 years with the developer and with the government registry to maintain that habitat. And often takes a long time. They'll be saying, you're not just, you planted a hedgerow, it has to stay there. They're saying, you planted a hedgerow. The hedgerow has to now grow and become wildlife rich, as you have said it. Well, so there's. Yeah, there's a quite a clear system. I know it's got challenges. Yeah, I know that. What? You know, I've heard good things from farmers who are selling biodiversity units. It's quite a limited scope, so you have to be just with the Right opportunity in the right place. So it's not available to every farmer by any means. And I've also looked. There's. There's also considerable housing shortage in the uk. We've got a lot of people and everyone wants better houses. And so there's. For as long as I can remember, there's been targets for housing, like there's been targets for forestry that are never met. We're always trying to build more houses and it's becoming more and more urgent. And there's been a raft of different legislation to try and bring housing up to better environmental standards, of which the. This is one. And I think the challenge has been on paper, it gives clarity. The developer knows exactly what they want to do. They can price it in, they know the price of units, but actually at local authority level, the local government bodies delegated to review it, the planning authorities, they have very different levels of knowledge, very different requirements for what they ask for. So actually, for the developer, it's not as clear as they thought. And they could go one to one local authority and they'll be told one requirement and another will have another. So do you think a lot of. Lot of teething issues, but

[B]

do you think at that, that you just described something that I was thinking about at, obviously, at the local level, are you seeing local councils or local governments valuing different elements of biodiversity differently? For instance, you just mentioned in the beginning, you're like, there's some valuable habitats from a biodiversity perspective that are devoid of wildlife, whilst other people would say biodiversity means. Oh, no, no. And again, this is a controversial issue in England because, you know, your deer species aren't natural, right? So if you had roe deer or fallow deer or something like that, they're like, oh, we want that somewhere else. Forget about the invasiveness of it, forget about the. The non nativeness of it. Are we seeing people discover. Talk about biodiversity differently?

[C]

Everyone's talking about it. That's different. One of my jobs, what, 15 years ago, I had a job in the Scottish Parliament, sort of biodiversity advocacy role with some very small wildlife charities. And they got together and said, we're all very small wildlife charities, got no money, we've got no parliamentary advocacy, but we want politicians, politicians to talk about biodiversity. And so they come up with a scheme where individual politicians would sponsor individual important species in Scotland called Species Champions. And so they were given a fact sheet and they were taken out to see the species habitat and they started talking about it in Parliament. And it was revolutionary because suddenly we had all these politicians whose Briefs were on transport and housing and other things, talking about biodiversity. And they'd never thought about it really or talked about it before. And since then I've seen and it certainly not all thanks to that project. But that was one of the things that happened is biodiversity has just come up the agenda and now housing developers are all talking about it because they have to, but then everyone starts debating it and so, yeah, is it about habitat, species, how do you measure it?

[B]

I think isn't that the crux of the question? What is biodiversity?

[C]

Yes, and I'm really conscious it's often very value driven.

[B]

Is that a bad thing?

[C]

Particularly in the uk, all our habitats are highly modified. We've got no wild forest, we've got things called nature reserves, but they're often full of sort of heritage sheep farming. We've lost all our big predators, we have no wolves or lynx or we've reintroduced sea eagles and that's a big, big, big effort. So, yeah, we've got this very human centric, we've been designing our landscape for a long time. And the way Scotland, that vision you've got of Scotland is a human made habitat. So what should we put it back to or where are we trying to go with it? Are we trying to conserve what we had 200 years ago before the Industrial Revolution when we had traditional farming, or are we trying to go back to something after the Ice Age and we have the wildwood, or should we be reintroducing big predators and there's too many options and there's quite a lot of conflicts and choices. So how do you come up with a system? But then there's a lot of things where everyone agrees that'd be a good thing to do. We need to reverse insect decline, that's very important. But it's not very glamorous. It's difficult to get people enthusiastic about that. So how do you measure the biodiversity and how do you change it? And so this habitat metric is one good start, because an arable field is not as valuable for biodiversity as a complex structured native woodland. And you can kind of put some numbers on that and create a scoring system. But then, although I think you have to also take thing called leakage into account, which is where? Well, we've taken that arable field out of production and turned it into a complex structured native woodland. Where's that wheat going to be produced now? Is it someone else's? Someone else's rainfall is getting cut down.

[B]

So, yeah, Eleanor, you talked, you said earlier, you said biodiversity is tied to value. Is that a bad thing? Commodification, essentially, of biodiversity?

[C]

Well, it's. I. It's.

[B]

Isn't that what has to drive it? If somebody's going to buy biodiversity credits, which is, at the end of the day, probably the crux of the scheme. Right. Somebody wants it, somebody has to value it. And that value is tied to some sort of dollar euro, pound price.

[C]

But I was using value in two different ways just to muddle that sort of thing. Yeah. I now realize people value biodiversity in emotional ways, so they're not always. So that if you ask people in Scotland which are their favorite natural places, often it's shown in photos and say, which do you like best? They'll often pick, oh, I really like that one. That looks lovely. And you say, well, that's actually all non native species of tree and that lake was dug by a Victorian and none of that is natural. That's been put there. That's kind of gardening. But then. Yeah, or people will have spent their life. There's a big debate in forestry in the UK about curlew, which are birds that live on open land and don't cope well as soon as there's some trees in the landscape. And the UK has been very important for wading birds like curlew, perhaps because humans created these treeless landscapes in the past. So on the one hand you've got people saying, well, we need more trees, we should have much more trees, be good for wide diversity and abundance of wildlife. On the other hand, you have people saying that the UK hosts a globally important population of curlew and other wading birds that are going to be wiped out. So do you have one thing that's more unique or do you have lots of things that are perhaps less unique but more original? And then how do you judge that? It comes down to whether people prefer wandering in woodland or prefer watching curlew. And it's very difficult to do it in an impartial basis.

[B]

Wow. Yeah, I can see the conundrum.

[C]

So now we're trying to design more interesting metrics. There's some really interesting work going on. The one that I like at the moment is Operation Wallacea, who started out as a group of scientists measuring biodiversity for various reasons, and they thought that we need a kind of metric and so they do it using a bundle of different metrics and there's ways of doing it to pick right ones for a particular site. So you measure that habitat. As I was saying, you can score the habitat, but then you look at wildlife as well, and you say, we're Going to use audio monitoring to count birds and see how many different bird species we've got. And then you can measure different types of flowers and you can do pollinator traps. And so you have a collection of different things you're measuring to get a much rounder picture. So if you, in that farming hedgerow example, you could create a lovely hedgerow, but if you're spraying the neighbouring field with lots of pesticides, you might have no insect in the hedgerow, which then you have no birds in the hedgerow, then what's the point of having a hedgerow? Whereas if you're also measuring birds and pollinators, then you can say, well, hang on, why haven't we got the insects we expect? Well, maybe the farmer not only needs to create the hedgerow, they need to create a buffer with their spraying or spraying.

[B]

So, Eleanor, a logistical challenge I see immediately is measuring this all. Yes, it's easy to measure, like habitat. Right. A hedgerow going in, easy to measure, way harder to measure. Butterfly presence, absence, abundance, pollinator. How do we even go there?

[C]

It gets expensive very quickly, so you have to try and find the things that are going to measure something useful that are not too expensive. One I like is birds, because you can now, I don't know how far around the world the Merlin app has got.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we've got it here.

[C]

Yeah. Where you can essentially stick recorders around your site and set it up to be running something like the Merlin app, and it can be listening for birds all the time. And then you can have loads of data on what birds are out there. You can analyze it using AI and quite quickly and cheaply you can get a really good rich picture. And if you know what birds are there, then you can see, well, there's lots of seed eating birds. We must have good habitat. There's lots of insect eating birds. Now we've got lots of predator birds that must be there at the top of a complex food web. So you can learn a lot about wider wildlife through measuring something like that.

[B]

No, that's an incredible metric. That's exactly what we need to be doing.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's a very good one.

[B]

Eleanor, how do we scale this? How do we go from the local municipality that's in rural England, to a million acre block in Tanzania?

[C]

I think there are two sort of types of landscape this is going to apply. The one where things are happening is that regenerative farming type landscape or managed forestry, Where the land is part of someone's supply chain and up the supply chain, big Banks and investors are starting to say we can see that biodiversity is going to be something important. We need to get a handle on this. We're going. The companies we invest in need to look at this. So they ask the companies they invest in to give them a biodiversity report. The company then goes and it all works down the chain and ultimately the farmer has to go and do their biodiversity report, send it back up the chain. And that's starting to change the way change things like pesticide use or soil management. And that's going to be crucial. I think that's really important and it gets perhaps a bit overlooked. That needs to be pushed ahead and change things because that's the big drivers of biodiversity loss is productive land use for the natural areas, the reserves, the natural habitats. That's where it gets more challenging because they need an income stream for their management. And you'll have loads of examples of where hunting is a key part of habitat management. Certainly in the uk, this is how I discovered. Got interested in hunting, which I previously didn't know anything about, was perhaps a bit suspicious of. But it's so crucial for. For forests in the UK because we haven't got the natural predators and deer are the big enemy of tree regeneration. But that's expensive. So if you want to have continuous cover forestry with regenerating trees, you have to pay the salary of your forester and your hunter.

[B]

Why were you suspicious of it before you learned about the economy?

[C]

Grew up in a city reading books. Guns are a bad thing. Guns kill people.

[B]

I totally get it. Totally.

[C]

I don't like cards either, but I was more familiar with cars because they drove around outside, whereas you didn't see guns in my world. You saw them on television killing people. So I think that's. And then, you know, you'd hear on the news that we had a big school shooting when I was quite young in the UK and gun laws were tightened up and that was the framing of my knowledge of things hunting. But I did have. I did as an environmentalist. I was thinking I went through a short vegetarian phase and realized it caused a lot of trouble to my mother. So I gave up on that. But I kind of thought, if I'm going to eat this stuff, I should be able to. I should know where it comes from and I should be prepared to do it yourself. Do the things that. Yeah. So a very long time later, a few years ago, I went out with a forester connection who stalks deer on a neighboring farm and he taught me to shoot a gun. And then we Went to look for some deer and the deer had all heard what was going on, they'd made tracks. So I've yet to, yet to shoot a deer. But yeah, it's quite changed my perspective on that. I also had, I suppose I changed my perspective on forestry and I grew up, I was, yeah, I've got this very academic background and growing up was inclined to think that academic background is a mark of cleverness and of wisdom and intelligence. And it wasn't really until I started working in the rural economy I discovered all these incredibly wise foresters with this deep knowledge of ecology and woods and things. They'd Left school at 16 and gone and worked with a chainsaw in the woods. And more recently, and then because I was in forestry, there are all these divisions in the rural economy, aren't there? And you think, you think your bit is the good bit and those bastards over the fence doing, they're the ones destroying the planet. But more recently I've worked with farmers as well and discovered they're all doing interesting things and very recently had a wonderful day out with a gamekeeper on a Scottish rewilding estate who'd been there for 35 years managing gamekeeping for various different manager's objectives. And the recent one is the rewilding one. So he changed the objectives. But his knowledge of forest is very good at understanding habitat, three dimensional habitat. But he understood the relationships between animals, the wild animals and the birds and the domestic animals and the insects. And he said, have you noticed that there's no midges here? Which is very unusual on Scottish estate. He said there's no midges because I've done such a good job of bringing the deer numbers right down to such a low level that the trees are regenerating. But this isn't a natural state either because there's no deer. So what are the midges going to eat? They're blood sucking insects, so they've declined. So we need to get the trees in and then we can let the deer back and then the midges will come back, people will go away and the birds will come back. And I'd never heard that those relationships explained before by all the academics.

[B]

Isn't it fascinating that you just given me examples of, from hunting to this midge example, to some others that, and this is the struggle that I have. I live in this world day in and day out, like what you've just described, just changing people's minds is what I do. And there is no, there's no better way to do it than to Just say, just come with me, let me just show you, let me show you, like, you know, a perception of hunting. If I, if I put anybody with a stalker or a gamekeeper or a professional hunter or a tracker, I can almost 100% guarantee that. Not that you've become a hunter, but at the end of the day you will say, I still don't like it, but I understand it now.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's like, how do I. And this again, a podcast is one way to do it. How can I. Because I can't take everybody, I can't take everybody into the field. You can't take everybody into the woods to explain this. So how do we get this message across in a way that again, you're like, yeah, academics are great, but they're limited in almost a real world context of like, hey, take that knowledge and hey, see how it actually works on the ground. Which is again, going, tying back to the biodiversity scheme of things, this biodiversity credits academically. It sounds great to capture all these biodiversity metrics, but take that academic in the field and go, tell me how I'm going to measure insect biodiversity and tell me how I'm going to do it at a dollar an acre.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's the challenge, is that you say, well, we have to measure it properly so that it's impartial. And then it's almost impossible to scope everything. I've mentioned all sorts of things that you might want to include and things like, what are the effects of this change on the site, off the site, that's, that's so important, so hard to measure. But we kind of know, often we know what needs to be done. You could, I'm sure you've got sites where you could say, what this place needs is this. And you could say, someone could say, well, what will it cost over the next 10 years to deliver that management? Well, it'd be, you know, a couple of guys, three days a week. Well, yeah, that'd be however much, whatever it is, some sensing, some kit, and we know what is needed and we know how to deliver that. And you almost need to find a way to start from that and say, right, let's pay for that. Then how are we going to. That's the other way of saying the value, what the value to society is. Well, we know it's more than the

[B]

price of, but will society pay it?

[C]

But, well, and that's the third challenge is, yeah, how do you measure it? What does it cost? But then who's going to pay for it? And everyone Wants. Everyone wants someone else to pay for it, don't they?

[B]

Eleanor, where does it go from some

[C]

ways in those supply chains, it's kind of. It's becoming a bit like health and safety. You know, not that long ago people were dying all over the place from industrial accidents. We didn't say, well, he's going to pay for it. We just said, right, well this isn't acceptable anymore. It needs to get done. And it was. Companies had to start putting health and safety policies in place, probably spent load. The health and safety industry is now a big industry with lots of money spent on it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And I think it has to be like that. How do you do that? Wild land. So that's the difference between the managed land for production and the wildland. How do you. And one mechanism that. And there's no way to do it apart from some kind of payment, tax, credit exchange system that those in the economy have to pay for. I think a kind of route in might be the global target for 30% of biodiversity of the world to be managed for biodiversity by 2030. We haven't got too long. And if you could say, well, everyone in the economy is going to have to play their part in that. Companies are having to report on biodiversity in their own supply chain. Well, let's say they also have to report on how they're making their contribution to that 30 by 30 target. That's a kind of mechanism that's perhaps got a bit of political acceptability about it. That might be a way to start to introduce that. I think we need some. They'll have to be the market and the public sector. The governments and businesses are going to have to negotiate this and agree this needs done. We're going to do it. And you don't meet many people who say, no, this is a waste of time, we're not going to do this. We don't care about biodiversity. In a way it's more uncontentious than climate change because it's more in front of our eyes. But it's just so difficult with all the other things that have to be done. The housing crisis, political crisis. It's prioritizing it.

[B]

Eleanor, to follow on from that piece is almost like an end to the wrap up here. What is the future like? Let's go from here for the next 10 years. What needs to happen? Are there more test beds that need to happen in the world? What do you think is happening going to happen between now and 10 years time from a biodiversity credit perspective?

[C]

I think biodiversity credits are going to start to emerge. I'm quite optimistic that they'll follow the path of carbon credits, and we've learned they can follow it faster in many ways, because we've learned now what makes a good, robust carbon credit. And much of that can be applied to biodiversity. And we kind of know why carbon credits are useful and necessary, and we can apply that to biodiversity. And I think there are some biodiversity credits being registered and traded in very small numbers. I think that method of credits is so useful for businesses who don't want to have to do all the measuring themselves or don't want to have to understand the details of biodiversity, that it will start to be taken up. So I think there's. What I've been talking to landowners about in the UK is that if you've got something that's going on already, if you've already got a site where you're thinking about conservation for a wide range of reasons, you're thinking about change over the next 10 years, that could be a really good opportunity for testing it. If you want to measure it already, you're thinking of doing a habitat metric and doing audio, monitoring the birds for your own purposes. Well, set it up properly as a credit, your kind of baseline, start generating the credits and then when the market does start to appear, if it does, but you'll be really well placed to, you'll be there first, you'll be ready and everyone else will be scrambling to get in. I think that's a sort of venture capital investment. It's a risky investment that if you can do it in a format that's not too risky, because it meets a lot of other goals, then why not? And the analogy I use is, in the UK, the carbon code is 15 years old, the woodland carbon code is 15 years old. Our trees grow pretty slowly in the UK, so it's only now that the first carbon credits are actually maturing. And if you're a landowner now, you'd think, gosh, If I'd known 15 years ago that if I had registered a woodland and developed it in those 15 years, demand for carbon units has really gone up. If you got carbon units, they're worth a lot of money. But the early schemes, they were quite few and small and far between, and they tended to sell their credits up front as promissory sort of credits, and so now they have nothing to sell. If you'd bank the credits, you'd be cashing in now. So are we, at that moment, for biodiversity? We don't know, but I think there's A very good chance. That's the trend. If we're not going in that direction, then we're going to have to solve it another way or we're going to

[B]

be all in trouble. No, that's a great, that's a great analogy. And I really, really. Actually, you know, we've talked a little bit about simplifying biodiversity measurements. I love the idea that Merlin app is an excellent, simple tool in which you could just do simple, you know, again, strategically, like you say, put together, you know, every morning at the same time, you're going to a different spot and you're just recording on your Merlin app for two minutes and you're just gathering that data. It takes nothing, costs hardly anything.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And you're gathering that data for what could potentially happen in the next 15 years. And all of a sudden, as you said, you're positioned in a way that can take advantage of something that is developing in the next 15 years or

[C]

just to show the impact of what you're doing. If you were going into a new site that's been unmanaged, it's got a lot of invasive species and you're going to control them and you're saying, we know, we believe these are impacting breeding birds. Well, let's put a Merlin app in at the beginning. Let's put the, let's start collecting the data at, start and track it over time. And then a year or two in, when you've been doing that work, you can start to see, well, is, is the work we're doing worthwhile?

[B]

It's amazing.

[C]

And that's amazing. That's what's really developing is that measuring and monitoring and putting it all on a much more data driven basis, which is. Yeah. Which is great in itself.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Well, Eleanor, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated it.

[C]

Thanks for having me.

[B]

I know I learned a lot. I know our listeners will have learned a lot and had some questions. Obviously it generated a bunch of questions. But yeah, these kinds of things are so new and you don't really know much about them until you start peeling the onion later a little bit. And that's what we've done a little bit today. So if anybody's interested in learning more about biodiversity credits, where can they go?

[C]

You can come and find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to find Perfect.

[B]

Eleanor Harris on LinkedIn.

[C]

Yes. I put my head, I've got. My middle name's Margaret, so I'm Eleanor M. Harris. Distinguish me from the other ones and Biodiversity Credit Yeah. Check out. As I said, Operation Wallacea are the group that I'm particularly interested in at the moment because. And they're global as well. Whereas other things that I know about are UK based. They've got some good information about their scheme in that bundle of metrics. Idea.

[B]

Perfect. Perfect. We'll definitely check it out. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Maybe we'll connect in a couple of years time and see how we are moving this biodiversity ball forward.

[C]

Yeah, I hope so. That would be great. Yes. Because it will have all moved on in a couple of years.

[B]

Perfect. Thank you.

[C]

Lovely.

[B]

Well, that's it for today. I appreciate you listening, as always. Leave a review, share it with your friends and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth around hunting.