Australia's Nature Repair Market — National Biodiversity Certificate Scheme

The Nature Repair Act 2023, passed by the Australian Parliament, establishes tradeable biodiversity certificates administered by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER). The Nature Repair Rules 2024 set out the process, and the first approved method — replanting native forest and woodland ecosystems — was determined on 1 March 2025.

Each registered project earns one biodiversity certificate, which is personal property that can be held, sold to private buyers, or deposited with the regulator. The CER also operates the Biodiversity Market Register, a public database that lets anyone view project details, monitor progress and track certificate ownership once issued.

The first project — 438 hectares of previously cleared land in north-east New South Wales — was registered on 13 August 2025 (project ID NR001014) and was dual-registered under the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme, so it will also earn carbon credits as the replanted trees grow. A second Nature Repair Market project was registered in New South Wales by May 2026. The market is therefore still in its earliest stages — only two projects registered in the scheme's first roughly eighteen months — even though government estimates put Australia's broader biodiversity-linked market opportunity at AUD 137 billion, of which only a small fraction currently flows through this legislated scheme itself.

Read the full analysis: https://cer.gov.au/schemes/nature-repair-market-scheme