Protect the wild and get credits, farmers hear

Could farmers get money for protecting birds or plants? That's the hope of the European Union, which is seeking to monetise biodiversity by creating a market for "nature credits".

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Brussels – Could farmers get money for protecting birds or plants? That's the hope of the European Union, which is seeking to monetise biodiversity by creating a market for "nature credits".

The European Commission last month launched a series of talks with financial, farming and green groups to ponder the idea, which has some environmentalists worried.

"You can make good money by razing a forest to the ground, but not by planting a new one and letting it grow old," the EU's environment commissioner Jessika Roswall told a Global Solutions conference in Berlin on Monday, adding the bloc wanted to change that.

The plan is still in its infancy and no concrete details have been put forward yet.

But the idea is to replicate the financial success of carbon credits, which launched two decades ago to help finance efforts to tackle global warming and have developed into a trillion-rand global market.