Governing high-integrity markets for ecosystem services

Abstract

There is growing global interest in the potential for ecosystem markets to facilitate climate and nature recovery. Yet, poorly designed and operated markets are prone to corporate “greenwashing” and negative consequences for nature and local communities. With the rapid scaling of ecosystem markets around the world, there is a need to systematically analyse ecosystem market governance principles, and identify the practical steps needed to implement these principles at national scales across multiple high-integrity ecosystem markets. The majority of principles published to date are designed to be applied at international scales or within single markets. However, national policy oversight is essential to ensure emerging ecosystem markets deliver natural capital outcomes and wider public benefits appropriate to the jurisdictions in which they operate.

This paper therefore analyses principles for the development and operation of high-integrity ecosystem markets, proposing how these could be operationalised in the UK, where governments are actively developing new governance regimes for rapidly proliferating voluntary markets and emission reduction or removal activities that occur within a company’s supply chain (“insetting”). The paper:

• 1.
  Provides the first comprehensive overview of compliance and voluntary carbon and other ecosystem markets operating in the UK in 2025, with a focus on new and emerging voluntary markets, alongside the first analysis of relevant ecosystem market actors in the UK.
• 2.
  Conducts a comparative analysis of existing national and international principles, identifying 15 high-level principles for governance, measurement, reporting and verification, and delivering wider benefits of high-integrity ecosystem markets, that could be applied by relevant market actors to the range of ecosystem markets identified in the UK as well as to insetting activities; and.
• 3.
  Proposes how these principles could be applied in an ecosystem markets governance hierarchy, showing policy, governance and market mechanisms and infrastructure that are being developed to implement the proposed principles in the UK, and discusses implications for international policy and markets.

The principles focus on robust governance, transparent measurement and verification, and equitable environmental and social benefits, ensuring credible and lasting outcomes from ecosystem markets. Taken together, the proposed market principles and governance hierarchy could be used to ensure the development of high-integrity ecosystem markets across the UK and internationally, helping national governments to responsibly build and scale these markets, and market actors design codes, schemes and projects that achieve additional carbon, biodiversity, and community gains across multiple contexts.