In the previous installment, we examined how biodiversity credits convert verifiable ecological improvements into tradable units capable of mobilizing private financing for conservation. However, a key question remains open: who is willing to pay for these credits, and what forces are shaping this emerging global market? Moreover, what is the legal framework in Peru?
Who buys biodiversity credits?
Unlike traditional conservation schemes, biodiversity credits are not aimed at a single type of buyer. Their demand arises from a convergence of economic, regulatory, and strategic interests.
- Companies with impacts on ecosystems. Particularly in sectors such as mining, energy, infrastructure, and agribusiness. For these actors, biodiversity credits offer a mechanism to complement—rather than replace—the mitigation hierarchy, allowing residual impacts that cannot be fully avoided or mitigated to be addressed.
- Corporations with voluntary nature-positive commitments. Driven by frameworks such as the TNFD. In these cases, the purchase of credits does not respond to a direct legal obligation, but rather to the need to demonstrate measurable progress on biodiversity to investors, regulators, and consumers.
- Investors and financial institutions. These actors are beginning to internalize biodiversity loss as a material risk in the valuation of assets and portfolios. For them, biodiversity credits represent a way to channel capital toward reducing systemic risks associated with ecological degradation.
- States and public entities. Some governments are starting to explore these instruments as complementary mechanisms to achieve national conservation goals, particularly in contexts of fiscal constraint. An illustrative example is Ecuador, where in 2023 a debt-for-conservation swap was structured through the issuance of Amazon Conservation DAC (Amazon DAC). In this transaction, a special-purpose vehicle acquired sovereign debt of the Republic of Ecuador at a discount, financed through the issuance of international bonds. The repurchased debt was subsequently cancelled, and the country assumed long-term financial commitments aimed at conserving the Amazon. Peru has also experienced a debt-for-nature swap of approximately USD 20 million linked to conservation efforts with the United States.
Across all cases, the common element is clear: what is being purchased is not abstract biodiversity, but verifiable ecological outcomes.
What is driving this new global market?
The emergence of biodiversity credits is a response to three structural transformations.
First, there is growing recognition that biodiversity loss constitutes a real economic risk. Ecosystem degradation affects water availability, agricultural productivity, territorial stability, and ultimately the viability of entire business models.
Second, traditional conservation financing mechanisms are increasingly exhausted. Public budgets and international cooperation have proven insufficient relative to the scale of the challenge. The conservation financing gap persists, even in countries with high levels of biodiversity.
Third, there has been an advance in corporate disclosure and risk-management frameworks, such as the TNFD, which push companies to measure, manage, and report their dependencies and impacts on nature. In this context, biodiversity credits emerge as a concrete tool to translate broad commitments into actions that are measurable and comparable.
How do biodiversity credits operate in Peru?
In Peru, as of the end of 2025, biodiversity credits have not yet been explicitly incorporated into environmental legislation as a formal compensation mechanism or as a recognized instrument for conservation financing. Nevertheless, the existing regulatory framework contains technical and conceptual elements that could enable their future development.
Compensation Units and habitat banks
Peruvian environmental legislation already includes a key technical foundation for the potential implementation of biodiversity credits, even though this instrument has not been explicitly incorporated into current regulations.
The Guidelines for Environmental Compensation within the framework of the National Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA) define Compensation Units (Unidades de Compensación, UC) as the metric used to quantify and transact ecological losses and gains. These units are constructed on the basis of Total Ecological Value (Valor Ecológico Total, VET) and allow objective equivalence to be established under the no-net-loss principle: the VET lost due to a project must be compensated by an equivalent VET gained through conservation or restoration actions.
This definition constitutes the first technical foundation for a biodiversity credit system in Peru: it transforms biodiversity—or more precisely, its ecological attributes—into comparable, measurable, and verifiable units, which is an indispensable condition for any results-based scheme.
The same Guidelines propose a broad set of conservation actions eligible for compensation, including:
- Improving the conservation status of ecosystems, for example through biological corridors.
- Creation and/or expansion of private or regional conservation areas, aligned with the master plans of protected natural areas.
- Prevention and protection of biodiversity against threats, through conservation agreements or similar mechanisms.
- Conservation and management of the hydrological regime, wetlands, and components of the hydrological system.
- Protection of headwaters and environmental flows.
- Habitat banks, in accordance with regulations to be issued by the Ministry of the Environment.
- Other options that comply with the principles and objectives of environmental compensation.
Among these elements, the inclusion of habitat banks is particularly relevant. While the Guidelines recognize them as a valid compensation action, no specific regulation currently defines their creation, governance, operation, or transaction mechanisms. In practice, this means that the concept is normatively acknowledged but institutionally incomplete.
Nevertheless, from a technical and comparative perspective, it is reasonable to interpret that habitat banks could become the natural space in which Compensation Units are generated, consolidated, and eventually transacted, fulfilling a role analogous to that of project registries in carbon markets. In this sense, future biodiversity credits in Peru would likely be closely associated with this type of conservation action, provided that clear rules on ecological integrity, additionality, permanence, and verification are established.
In summary, Peru does not yet have a biodiversity credit market, but it does possess the basic technical architecture—Compensation Units, eligible conservation actions, and the concept of habitat banks—upon which such a market could be built in the future through complementary regulation.
Draft regulatory framework for biodiversity credits
Finally, it is important to note that the Ministry of the Environment has formally initiated the development of a specific framework for these instruments. Through Ministerial Resolution No. 00352-2025-MINAM, published on 30 December 2025, the publication of the draft “Guidelines for the design and operation of biodiversity credit projects” was ordered.
As of 4 January 2026, the content of this draft regulation is not yet publicly available, making it impossible to assess its technical scope, its articulation with the environmental compensation system, or its potential interaction with existing instruments such as Compensation Units or habitat banks.
Once the document is published and analyzed, it will be necessary to assess the extent to which these guidelines establish an adequate framework for ecological integrity, traceability, and governance, or whether they introduce additional challenges for the implementation of biodiversity credits in the country. This assessment will be addressed in a forthcoming installment.
