The International Space Station in 2018. Photo by NASA
Biodiversity credits are being pushed as a means to fund nature conservation. (A biodiversity credit is a certificate representing an uplift in biodiversity that’s additional to what would have occurred otherwise, which can then be bought and sold on a market.)
Technology is increasingly being deployed for the monitoring and payment of biodiversity credits. A near-future could see satellites in space used to predict measures of biodiversity, programmable payments to autonomously pay out credits, and AI agents to allow a more flexible processing of data.
A paper published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution argues that these technologies may benefit nature finance and biodiversity credits, but could also pose new risks.
The paper’s lead author is Dr Joe Millard, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow here in Zoology. The work represents the first significant output from his project "Novel AI and economic mechanisms to help solve biodiversity change". His co-authors include Professor Lynn Dicks, leader of the Agroecology Group, and members of the University of Oxford and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
Having set out the current state of play on biodiversity credits, the authors go on to describe a set of technological step-changes in relation to credits, before assessing the effect these changes might have on selected current credit systems.
Should they occur, these three step-changes would create an unbroken link between a remotely monitored measure of biodiversity, the generation of a credit, and the payment of that credit to an individual. The authors explain that this link could be problematic, and describe some of the reasons why.
Specifically, they say that error in measurement might mean that credits monitored from space are not well correlated with change in biodiversity, that automated algorithms of financial decision-making have a precedent for creating an environment in which price volatility can occur, and that the behaviour of AI agents incorporated into credit pipelines could be unpredictable.
The paper calls for a considered implementation of autonomous credit technology, making some suggestions for the predictability of measures of biodiversity from space, potential volatility of digital assets for nature, and guardrails for AI agents.
Read the paper: Millard, J., Barzin, S., McCann, P. et al. Potential risks from automation of biodiversity credits. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03238-4
Image: The International Space Station in 2018 Photo by NASA
This news item was originally published on the Department of Zoology's website on 10 November 2026:
https://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/news/biodiversity-credits-what-price-automation