Plan Vivo: “Community-led nature-based projects offer real solutions, both for nature and carbon. They’re ready now.”

Exclusive interview with Keith Bohannon, CEO of Plan Vivo Foundation and Toral Shah, Nature Lead at Plan Vivo Foundation. During the upcoming AGES Pre-Conference Day on 24 February, Keith is a panellist in the biodiversity credits workshop.

Interview Summary:
Plan Vivo CEO Keith Bohannon and Nature Lead Toral Shah emphasise Africa’s vital role in emerging biodiversity credit markets. The foundation, with over 25 years of experience certifying community-led nature-based projects, channels finance to initiatives that restore ecosystems, deliver climate benefits and support local communities.

Through PV Nature, they certify projects using rigorous science-based methodologies, with six African projects already in the pipeline. They highlight challenges such as upfront funding needs and balancing rigour with accessibility, but stress that community-led projects offer real, high-integrity solutions. At Africa’s Green Economy Summit, Plan Vivo will call for collaboration to accelerate biodiversity markets.

Thank you for joining us. Please can we start with some background on you, the Plan Vivo Foundation and your goals.

Keith: Hi, I’m Keith Bohannon, CEO of the Plan Vivo Foundation. We’re a leading certification system for nature-based projects in both carbon and nature markets. We’ve been around for over 25 years, and we’ve got a strong track record of certifying projects across the world, including many here in Africa. Our mission is to channel responsible finance to community-led initiatives, particularly community-led initiatives that restore and protect nature, that deliver climate benefits and that also deliver benefits for local communities.

What is PV Nature and what projects do you have in Africa?

Toral: I’m Toral Shah, Nature Lead at the Plan Viva Foundation. I lead a programme called PV Nature, a leading or pioneering biodiversity standard that certifies community-led projects that aim to quantify biodiversity using a measurable and a science-based methodology. It enables fair access to finance for locally driven conservation and restoration efforts by combining ecological integrity with strong safeguards. It’s backed by rigorous project requirements, a methodology based on robust metrics for tracking ecosystem change. And it connects high-integrity projects with the growing demand in the emerging biodiversity market.

Currently we have about six Africa-based projects in our PV Nature pipeline. They are a mix of conservation and restoration projects, covering different ecosystem types and habitats led by local expertise and local project coordinators with a range of different local stakeholders and communities involved in the project design and development.

 

How important is the continent for the future of high-integrity biodiversity credit markets, and how can Africa take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity?

Toral: Biodiversity markets, particularly high-integrity credit markets, are really important for Africa as a continent. We all know that Africa is one of the last standing places with a huge amount of megafauna diversity and intact habitats. It’s particularly important for achieving landscape-level conservation or restoration efforts through various nature-based solutions.

We have a real opportunity with the emergence of biodiversity market to bridge the gap between the private and public sector, developing innovative solutions such as PV Nature and other biodiversity credit schemes, to embed nature-based solutions, participatory approaches and biodiversity benefits within policy and how we engage local stakeholders to manage their resources sustainably.

 

You are working in a system that is constantly evolving and changing. What are the main challenges in your view?

Toral: Through our work with PV Nature, we’re learning that this is a constantly changing environment. We need to acknowledge that the projects on the ground require a lot of support, upfront funding to be able to access this market, develop the projects with high integrity, with the ability to engage the stakeholders and the local communities effectively and meaningfully, and most importantly, especially for Plan Vivo, is to provide equitable benefit sharing to be able to really support long-term impact within these projects.

Another area around the emergence of this market is around striking a balance between rigour or robustness and accessibility and feasibility. There needs to be a realisation on what is possible with the available resources and how a priority or how high-integrity needs to be prioritized in the project designs and the frameworks that we are developing.

 

At the upcoming AGES, you are part of a workshop on biodiversity credits. Can you give us a preview of your expectations of this session are and what your own message will be?

Keith: I’m really delighted for Plan Vivo to be at Africa’s Green Economy Summit in Cape Town. We see it as a big opportunity to join in a conversation with other market shapers around biodiversity, which is a very exciting and emerging market.

We’d really like to use the opportunity of the workshop to talk about high integrity. It’s a big discussion point at the moment. It’s really important for building market confidence, but it’s a difficult concept to define. So what we’d like to do is to give an example of what high integrity really looks like in terms of having a very strong and robust methodology to measure real biodiversity outcomes, which are at the fundamental core of the biodiversity credit, but also the integrity of the process in which communities are placed as equal partners in the process and that they benefit fairly and equitably from the revenue generated from the sale of credits. So, we see that that is a good opportunity to talk about that high integrity aspect of the process.

As this is a new market, we also see an opportunity to talk about the real practical use cases and opportunities that are already out there, including the potential for stacking biodiversity credits, with carbon credits or the opportunity for corporates to build in nature as part of their long-term strategy and even make positive contributions to Nature Positive claims in the future. So we’d like to use this opportunity to show that there are real opportunities out there today.

 

How important is an event such as AGES for the continent?

Keith: We think the AGES event is really important and very timely. With the development of a new market like biodiversity and nature markets, really what’s key is bringing different stakeholders together. There’s often a tendency to have discussions in silos, where people working on the demand side are chatting to each other, people are working on the supply side are chatting to each other, but actually they’re not talking across those different sectors and disciplines. So we see this summit as an opportunity to bring together project developers and also certification standards like ourselves and market actors and corporates who could be the customers for these credits as well as policymakers. And by having dialogues that engage all the different stakeholders, there’s a big opportunity to accelerate this market and to accelerate this with an Africa focus.

 

Anything you would like to add?

Keith: Finally, I’d like to say that we all know we have big challenges to face in terms of climate change and in terms of the extent and the pace of biodiversity loss. And we really need to act now and to look for solutions that we can move on now. All the dialogue, all the discussion is really important, but in the end, we need solutions that we can implement.

Community-led nature-based projects offer real solutions, both for nature and carbon. They’re ready now. We have some amazing projects based here in Africa that are ready to deliver this impact. And we’d really welcome to have dialogue with anybody who’s keen to support, who’d like to invest in or fund these projects or help connect them.

So yes, we’re delighted to be here. We see huge potential for Africa to really lead the space and to have a positive impact for nature, positive impact for climate and for local communities as well.

 

Image attribution:Donal Boyd

Image attribution: Donal Boyd