Tech firms can give emerging biodiversity markets the ‘trust factor’ companies need to buy nature credits without fear of backlash, a data specialist told a webinar this week.
Speaking during an online panel on leveraging biodiversity credits to restore aquatic ecosystems on Thursday, Gilad Goren, executive director at The Nature Tech Collective (NTC), said technological advances could play a critical role in building the confidence needed to engage companies in a nascent market.
“We have to give them the trust factor so they know that they’re not going to get an article from a big media outlet criticising them because they invested or bought some credits,” he said, referring to the voluntary carbon market, which has come under fire over the past two years.
“If companies become comfortable with the fact that accuracy is a progressive target, they can be more willing to enter the market,” Goren said.
NTC is working on several biodiversity-related projects, including a credit initiative in a nearly one million-hectare South American national reserve.
Due to the unique challenges posed by aquatic environments, especially marine ecosystems, the nascent biodiversity credit market has focused so far on developing projects on land – though attention to water-based credits is increasing.
A growing number of tech companies are developing advanced tools for remote sensing and environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis that can help address many of the challenges and scale financing.
For instance, in July, intelligence firm NatureMetrics launched a system to automate the usually manual process of eDNA sampling to access real-time data even in the most remote aquatic locations.
However, many nature tech firms are still struggling to get funds, especially from governments, as pointed out by John Higley, CEO of EQO, a US-based biotechnology firm specialising in collecting eDNA in aquatic ecosystems.
“There’s a bit of a push and pull. Because when it comes to ecological and biological data for governments, there’s a big pressure to keep with what works and not to do a huge amount of new stuff,” he said during the webinar.
“Governments are more willing to fund new technologies through universities, but they’re not adopting very quickly those that are already developed and need support to be able to scale.”
“On the other hand, nonprofits and other project developers are a lot more open to new technologies, but often do not have enough funds.”
During the HackSummit in Lausanne, Switzerland, earlier this year, several tech companies told Carbon Pulse they’re struggling to attract investment for biodiversity monitoring, even in countries with a strong legislation in place, such as the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) scheme in England.
According to Goren, NTC is about to release a report outlining the key trends in the nature tech market.
By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com
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