Identification, Monitoring and Evaluation of Additionality in Habitat Banks
Additionality is a fundamental integrity principle of habitat banking and other biodiversity credit issuing projects, and ensures that the interventions and ecological uplift that result from the habitat bank would not have happened in the absence of the bank’s creation and management. EPIC analyzed additionality and its current regulatory context as applied to habitat banking in Colombia’s compensatory offset system, and proposed a Methodology for the Evaluation of Additionality in Colombia’s Habitat Banks.
This analysis aims to clarify the evaluation of additionality for habitat banks: first, the regulatory process of approval of the habitat bank itself. This context considers baseline conditions, bank creation outputs like management plans, and other evidence of good management and integrity principles that indicate the likelihood of the project being additional over time, which we call Approval Additionality. Second, the process to evaluate the degree of uplift over time, i.e. performance relative to a baseline and counterfactual, carried out through measurement of the actual observed change in the site and fulfillment of management milestones, called Outcome Additionality.
Credit release schedules are recommended as a useful tool to link Approval and Outcome Additionality to monitor performance over the long term, balance financial and performance risk, and to draw a clear connection between the outputs of habitat bank design and management with the outcomes of biotic additionality.