Credible Exchange
Environmental work that survives being checked.
A marketplace with two sides. On one, sponsors who have committed to improving the human-environmental prosperity of a place. On the other, providers who can actually go and do it, and whose results can be measured by somebody they are not paying.
State of play
What exists, and what is still a design.
Anyone arriving at a page like this has a reasonable question in mind, so it goes first. Is this a running marketplace, or a plan for one?
It is a plan, currently. There are no live listings on Credible Exchange, no units have been issued to anybody, no standard-setting body has been appointed and no independent auditor has been engaged. Until those last two exist, nothing here can honestly be called verified, and we are not going to use the word as though they did.
What does exist is more useful than a launch date. The rules a provider has to satisfy before it can be listed. The shape of the unit a sponsor takes a share of. The measurement discipline that has to sit underneath both. And one provider whose work can be described in specifics rather than adjectives, because a regulator has already examined it.
The rest of this site sets out those rules and marks, section by section, which parts are settled and which are still being defined.
Three gates, in this order
Name a standard. Appoint a body to hold it. Engage an auditor who answers to that body rather than to us. They only work in that sequence — a signature is worthless without a body behind it, and a body is worthless without a standard to apply. Doing them in the other order, or listing before any of them exist, is most of what went wrong with the last generation of environmental markets.
There is no launch date attached to that and we are not going to invent one. What a prospective sponsor or provider can usefully do in the meantime is say which coastline they care about, so that the first units defined are the ones somebody is actually waiting for.
The two sides
A market only works if both sides are hard to join.
Sponsors bring money and a reputation they cannot afford to have damaged. Providers bring vessels, crews and the ability to be wrong in public. Neither side is served by a low bar.
Sponsors
Corporates carrying an environmental commitment, funds with a stewardship mandate, philanthropies, resort and tourism groups, port and utility operators, and public bodies with a coastline to answer for.
What a sponsor takes is a fractional share in a defined unit of environmental work on a named place — the attribution, the measurement record, and the participation that goes with it.
What a sponsorship buys, exactly
Providers
Operators who can put equipment and people on a specific stretch of water or land, hold a permit from the regulator of that jurisdiction, and produce a measurement trail somebody else can audit.
The bar is deliberately awkward. Most environmental marketplaces fail on the supply side first, by listing intentions instead of operators.
What a provider has to show
The word we will not use loosely
What "verified" has to mean before we print it.
Six conditions. A unit that misses any one of them is a unit somebody would eventually have to defend in front of a journalist, and we would rather it did not exist.
- A method published before the work starts What will be measured, with which instruments, at what depth or distance, on what schedule. Written down and public before anyone touches the water, so it cannot be rewritten to fit the result.
- A baseline measured, not modelled Real readings from the actual site before the intervention. A baseline back-calculated afterwards is not a baseline; it is a preference.
- Measurement by a party with nothing riding on the answer Not the provider. Not the sponsor. Not a consultancy whose next contract depends on a good number. This is the condition that is hardest to arrange and the one everything else rests on.
- A named standard, applied by a named body Neither the standard nor the body has been settled. That is the largest open item on this platform and pretending otherwise would poison everything above it.
- Results published whether or not they flatter anybody Including the seasons where the measurement came back flat, or worse than the year before. A register that only records successes is a marketing channel.
- A stated boundary on what the number means Every measurement has a place, a period and an edge. A unit describes what happened inside that edge and makes no claim about anything outside it.
Boundaries
What this marketplace will not be.
Environmental credit markets have taught a lot of buyers to read pages like this one with their guard up. That is a rational response to the last decade, and the only useful answer is to be specific about the things we are ruling out.
- Not a security and not an investment. The word equity in eco-equity carries its older sense of a fair stake in something, not its financial one. A sponsorship pays no return, appreciates in no market, and is not an instrument any regulator would recognise as tradable.
- Not an offset. Nothing bought here entitles anyone to emit, discharge or clear anything anywhere else. Sponsorship of a repair is not a licence for a harm, and a market that blurs the two ends up defending the blur.
- Not self-certified. A platform owned by the same group as one of its providers cannot be the body that verifies that provider's results. That conflict is real, we are not going to argue our way around it, and the auditor has to be somebody else.
- Not a source of impressive global totals. Published estimates of what the world's reefs are worth span nearly two orders of magnitude depending on method, so no figure of that kind appears anywhere on this site. Place-specific numbers with a named source are the only ones worth printing.
Why bother building it
The stake is a working coastline, and it is measurable.
The case for this platform does not need an inflated number. The ordinary, sourced ones are alarming enough.
In 2022, for the first time, farms produced more aquatic animals than boats caught: 94.4 million tonnes against 92.3 million, inside a total harvest of 223.2 million tonnes worth about US$472 billion at first sale. Food security is moving into penned water. Penned water is the water that fails first when oxygen drops or a bloom drifts in.
Over the same span the fourth global coral bleaching event ran heat stress across 84 per cent of the world's reef area in 82 countries and territories, against 68 per cent in the third event and 21 per cent in the first. Reefs are not a scenic asset in that arithmetic. They are the fishery, the coastal defence and the tourism revenue in one structure.
A sponsor cannot fix that. A sponsor can fund a bounded, measured repair on one named place and be able to prove it afterwards. That is the whole product.
The provider we can describe
If your coastline is the problem, start with the water company.
Most of what fails on a populated coast fails through water: oxygen falling out of a bay, a bloom closing a beach or an intake, a heat event bleaching the reef the diving economy depends on. Those are treatable in place, and the treatment is a service somebody has to be equipped to run.
Alarivean, Inc. deploys the Credible Ventures water systems — SeaBreather as the platform, with ReefHealer, HABslayer and ChemSlayer as duties on it. It works out of Dubai, Zurich and Phoenix. It holds Florida Department of Environmental Protection permit FLOA00062 for a red tide mitigation field trial, documented independently by the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and the nonprofit START.
We will not call that a track record, because one permitted trial is not one. It is, however, more than most people offering to fix your bay can show you, and it is checkable without asking us.
The estuary programme's public line on the work deserves reading in full, because a search result flattens it into scepticism. Open-water efficacy has not been demonstrated. True, and the operator says so too. What the programme has actually asked for is the job of measuring it: technical help went into that permit application, funding deliberately did not, and it wants any claim reaching beyond Sarasota Bay to stand on numbers its own scientists collected. Nothing has been published against efficacy. Nothing has been published for it. Producing that evidence is the next piece of work, and having the local science body produce it is the arrangement both sides want.
The practical first step for a coastal community, a business or an industrial operator is the same either way: describe the water and let an operator tell you whether it is treatable.
Related in the group
Immediate, Significant, Scaled
Tell an operator about the place.
Whether you would sponsor the work or need it done, the useful first message is the same. Which water, what goes wrong, in which months, and what it costs when it does. Alarivean answers with a read on that specific site.