Voluntary Biodiversity Credit Pilot — Târnava Mare High Nature Value Grasslands (Romania)

Târnava Mare, in Transylvania, is a roughly 100,000-hectare region where one-third of the land is high nature value (HNV) grassland, including about 10,000 hectares of species-rich hay meadows farmed by small-scale, largely self-sufficient farmers using traditional low-intensity methods — no fertiliser or pesticides — that sustain exceptional plant and insect diversity, with 50+ plant species recorded in individual meadows.

Fundația ADEPT Transilvania, the mission-led project developer RePlanet, and the conservation-research organisation Operation Wallacea launched a voluntary biodiversity-credit scheme targeting 33,000+ hectares of HNV grassland, structured as 25-year land-management agreements (2022–2047) with local farmers. Credits are generated using the Wallacea Methodology — a 'basket of metrics' approach adapted from the Retail Price Index, in which one credit equals a 1% uplift (or avoided loss) in the median of six annually monitored indicators: breeding birds, herpetofauna, plants, butterflies, above-ground arthropods and soil invertebrates. The methodology underwent external peer review and has since been adopted as the basis for Plan Vivo's biodiversity-credit standard (launched December 2023) and is also used by Gold Standard.

At least 60% of credit-sale revenue is contracted to flow to the farmer generating the credit. An earlier, smaller-scale agri-environment payment scheme in the same landscape illustrates the baseline being scaled up: by 2016 it had paid roughly €37,000 to 73 farmers managing 171 hectares. Funding for the new pilot combines private-sector credit purchases — from companies pursuing 'Nature Positive' commitments — with EU LIFE Programme co-financing.

Caveat: ADEPT and RePlanet themselves describe this as 'one of the first biodiversity-credit funded initiatives in the world,' and as of the most recent public project page, results reporting is explicitly marked 'info to come' — no independently verified biodiversity-uplift outcomes or credit sales have yet been published. The scheme should currently be read as a promising, well-designed pilot rather than a proven model.

Read the full analysis: https://fundatia-adept.org/voluntary-biodiversity-credit-in-transylvania/