Q&A: Understanding Earthly’s biodiversity credit ledger

As more businesses step up to support nature,

Earthly’s biodiversity credit ledger

is offering a new level of transparency and accountability for their actions and impact. According to the

2023 Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) report

,

over 85%

of companies cited data quality and availability as major hurdles in reporting nature-related risks and impacts. This highlights a major gap in how businesses report and track their impact on nature. Earthly’s ledger aims to provide a transparent, data-backed solution.

In this Q&A, Angelina Purschel, the biodiversity credit ledger Technical Lead at Earthly, explains what the

biodiversity ledger

is, why it was created, how it works, and how it’s helping set a new benchmark for credible nature-based investment.

Angel:

The ledger is essentially a public, digital record of every biodiversity credit issued and sold through Earthly. Each credit represents a specific, measurable nature improvement – in our case, a 3×3 metre plot of land with enhanced biodiversity.

Angel:

The biodiversity ledger was created to record the creation, ownership, transfer, and retirement of small units within the projects we work with. Each unit signifies an area of verified ecological intervention. It functions a little like a financial ledger, but one that tracks habitat restoration mapped to a defined geospatial area that can be physically visited. 

Angel:

Absolutely! Our driving vision was to go beyond carbon and directly support nature. We saw that while many companies offset carbon, they struggled to address their “nature footprint.” Biodiversity loss is a critical crisis, and projects that restore ecosystems need funding. 

We created the biodiversity credit ledger as a way to channel private-sector finance into those projects in a transparent, trustworthy way. It’s about enabling businesses to invest in nature’s recovery and see exactly what their support achieves. Ultimately, our vision is a future where protecting and restoring biodiversity is just as mainstream as carbon.

Angel:

The biodiversity credit space is very new and has some big challenges. One issue is fragmentation – different projects and regions use different methodologies, and there hasn’t been a unified tracking system. This makes it hard to trust that a credit represents a real, one-of-a-kind conservation outcome. 

We also saw a risk of double-counting or double-selling, where the same conservation benefit could be claimed twice (even unintentionally) due to a lack of transparency. 

Another challenge is verification – ensuring that the biodiversity gains are properly measured and maintained over time. Our ledger helps tackle these problems head-on.

Angel:

By publicly recording each credit and tying it to a specific location and project, we ensure no two entities are claiming the same plot of restored habitat. It brings verification and accountability to the forefront – anyone can see who funded what, and where. We drew lessons from the carbon market as well: transparency and robust data are key to credibility. 

Our ledger also stores metadata about each credit (like the project type, area, duration of protection, etc.), which helps with verification and reporting. In short, the ledger addresses the trust gap in biodiversity credits – it assures businesses that the credits they buy are unique, real, and won’t be resold or misused.

Angel:

Technically, we designed the ledger with immutability and traceability in mind. Once a credit sale is recorded, it can’t be altered or deleted; this ensures an immutable history of all transactions. 

We also geo-tag each credit to a precise location. In fact, we integrated the What3Words geolocation system to assign a unique three-word address to every 3×3m credit square. This means anyone can trace a credit back to the exact patch of ground it’s supporting. 

These design choices - unique IDs for each credit, location-based tracking, and an open registry - prevent overlap or double-claims and make the whole system transparent.

Angel:

Biodiversity isn’t static; rewilded areas change over time. Our versioned ledger architecture allows updates to be layered over original entries. New assessments (like increased species counts) can enrich a unit’s record without altering its original state. This versioning ensures ecological improvements are recorded without losing historical accuracy.

Angel:

Each biodiversity unit is:

Angel:

Designing systems for ecological nuance at a global scale is tough. Biodiversity differs across regions, habitats and intervention types. We had to work with small, high-resolution geospatial data and align with frameworks like the Defra biodiversity metric and TNFD. Making the system intuitive for all stakeholders required careful abstraction of complexity without sacrificing detail.

Angel:

 Yes, standardising data from different projects took more effort than expected. Earthly works with varied nature-based solutions and datasets from different formats and coordinate systems. We had to balance accessibility with rigour - simplifying the interface while preserving essential data behind the scenes. It’s important that the system is usable without compromising scientific accuracy.

Angel:

 We have big plans for scaling up the ledger’s reach and impact. In the near term, we’re expanding the ledger as we partner with more biodiversity projects across different ecosystems and geographies, so it will become a global map of contributions to nature. 

We’re also working to integrate the ledger with industry standards and frameworks. For example, Earthly is involved in initiatives like the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, which is crafting high-integrity frameworks. We want our ledger to complement and even inform those wider standards, acting as a blueprint for transparency in biodiversity finance. 

In the future, as the market matures, there could be interoperability between platforms – we envision a world where biodiversity credits from various sources can be plugged into a network of ledgers or registries, all communicating to prevent double counting globally. We’re laying the groundwork for that by keeping our system open and high-integrity from day one. 

On a broader vision level, Earthly aims to help drive a significant upswing in nature investment. We often talk about helping to restore a measurable percentage of the planet: our mission being to protect or restore at least 1% of Earth by 2030. For us, the ledger is critical to scaling that ambition because it builds the trust needed for more investors to step in. 

Angel:

Even though the core idea of the ledger will remain, we’ll continue refining the technology, perhaps adding features like:

If we do this right, we hope to see biodiversity credits become a robust, mainstream tool in sustainability, with Earthly’s ledger playing a key role in making that market trustworthy and effective.

Angel:

 It’s a credibility layer. The ledger turns nature-based action into something verifiable, preventing greenwashing and building the trust needed to scale biodiversity credits as a mainstream sustainability tool.

Angel:

Most tech projects are abstract. This one is grounded in reality; each data point represents a real place, a species, a habitat. It’s inspiring to see engineers, ecologists, financiers, and business leaders collaborate to protect nature. This shared effort has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career.

If your company is looking to take credible action for nature, consider investing in Earthly biodiversity credits from verified, high-impact nature-based projects. This gives you a transparent, traceable record on our biodiversity credit ledger. It’s a meaningful way to show progress on sustainability goals and earn stakeholder trust.

Talk to

us to find out how to get started.