A US-based start-up is on a mission to help governments make it profitable to implement and enforce Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) by setting up an open-access analytics platform that among other things can form the basis for issuing biodiversity and blue carbon credits.

Negotiators from almost 200 nations in December agreed on the Global Biodiversity Framework, which includes a target of protecting 30% of oceans by the end of this decade.

Meeting that goal will require a major step up from the less than 8% of oceans currently protected – with only 2.4% fully protected.

The protection in many of the existing MPAs is not enforced because governments lack the resources or incentives to do so, and in some cases being designated a protected area may even make the situation worse as it attracts poachers, Gordon Gould told Carbon Pulse.

Together with his wife, Courtney Nichols Gould, and a group of other co-founders with various scientific and technological skills, he has started New Atlantis, a venture fixated on helping governments turn a profit by adequately protecting life in their oceans.

“We need to protect the oceans, and the traditional model of conservation isn’t going to get us there. Philanthropy is good, but at some stage you run out of money to give away,” Gould said.

New Atlantis’ solution is to build an open database or metagenomic platform with input from scientists around the world, containing environmental DNA (eDNA) from a wide range of species.

Governments or other organisations managing MPAs will be able to use that information when they take surface water samples from their protected areas, to help determine the health and resilience of the marine ecosystem, calculate changes in individual species numbers, the level of carbon storage, and so on.

Based on the analysis, those samples can then be used as verification to claim so-called blue carbon credits as well as biodiversity credits, providing the MPA regulators as well as contributing scientists with a revenue stream.

“The response from the ocean community has been fantastic,” said Gould, who has been working on the concept for nearly two years, striking up relationships with ocean scientists along the way.

He said a first version of the platform will be released in a month or so, and that New Atlantis expects to be in the market by the end of the year.

“We are pretty far down the road with a couple of MPAs that can be used as test cases,” he said.

Gould stressed that New Atlantis would not implement any projects itself, but that the company’s role would be to maintain and continuously improve the quality of the platform, as scientists point out potential for upgrades or contribute higher quality bioinformatics.

HELPFUL DNA

Environmental DNA and bioinformatics have been controversial issues at global biodiversity negotiations for years.

Big pharmaceutical companies and others have been able to develop hugely profitable products based on DNA strains from plants and animals.

But the problem has been that these companies have primarily come from developed nations with vast resources accessible, while the eDNA itself often stem from poor countries that get little or no reward for their contributions because they are not in a position to take advantage of the natural potential.

Gould said a side effect of New Atlantis would be that governments in developing nations would be able to build a library of gene clusters from their MPAs that they too could reap the benefits from.

But eDNA is also making its way into conservation efforts.

In a recent article for conservation technology network wildlabs.net, the University of Oxford’s Heather Needham said eDNA has emerged as a powerful tool to identify the presence of a species in an environment, which has already helped groups like Fauna & Flora International in their work.

The eDNA comes from shed biological material such as skin, hair, or feces, and makes it far easier to map present species in an area through sampling soil or water, compared to traditional efforts to observe and count.

“Collecting eDNA enables researchers to non-invasively and cost-effectively determine the presence of species in an environment from a relatively small biological sample, making it a valuable tool for species monitoring and management,” Needham wrote.

“In some cases, however there may not be enough eDNA in a sample to accurately identify a species due to DNA degradation. The rate at which eDNA breaks down depends on the type of environment the eDNA is shed within. There might also not have been enough pieces of DNA shed into the environment to make an accurate assessment,” she added.

CO-BENEFITS

New Atlantis’ vision is to use the wealth of information in its database – stored with blockchain technology to ensure data isn’t tampered with – to issue biodiversity credits that will generate revenue for the MPAs.

While much remains to be determined in terms of how the biodiversity credit market will work, including the specifics of the biodiversity credits New Atlantis aims to issue, interest is rapidly amassing as the urgency of the nature crisis is becoming clearer for global corporations.

However, the documentation gathered through New Atlantis might also have other, potentially huge, benefits beyond just the crediting, according to Gould.

Debt-ridden, nature-dependent emerging economies, for example, are highly vulnerable to debt rating risks, with downgrades often imposing large costs.

Coastal nations in such situations that protect their marine environment and proceed to document a bounceback in marine ecosystem health and resilience can avoid or counteract such risks, potentially saving huge costs, Gould said.

There are also opportunities in nature-based insurance and in nature- or weather-based derivatives, he added.

“We have to have healthy oceans, and we must make MPAs economically viable on their own,” he said.

Gould and his wife describe themselves as “serial entrepreneurs”, and in Nov. 2020 sold their previous venture – SmartyPants Vitamins – to Unilever for $200 million.

He said New Atlantis is the start-up he has been the most excited about, though, due to the vital importance of the health of the oceans.

“I feel like I have to try. We may not be the ones who succeed, but in the worst case scenario we can be an example for those who follow behind us,” he said.

“It’s happening, we’re doing it.”

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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