An open-access data platform has launched a tool aimed at enabling companies, financial institutions, and governments to better understand their impact on nature, it announced Tuesday during Climate Week NYC.
Restor said the tool, dubbed Restor Enterprise, intends to improve transparency, showing how and where investments in nature are being made, and to contribute to facilitating finance allocation.
“We need science and cutting-edge technology to make visible the actions of millions of local peoples and reward them for regeneratively managing the lands we all depend on,” said Thomas Elliott, CEO of Restor.
“This is why we developed Restor Enterprise – to bring full transparency to the environmental movement, fostering the accountability and trust needed for a truly equitable movement.”
The company announced Restor Enterprise alongside the governments of Costa Rica and Ethiopia, as well as a number of organisations that plan to use the tool to assess and manage their nature-related impacts.
These include financial services company Manulife, non-profit Community Climate Solutions, and direct air capture (DAC) technology firm Climeworks.
GOOD FOR GOVERNMENTS
Governments can use the tool to enhance nature conservation and restoration efforts, as pointed out by Eyasu Elias of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture.
“It helps us prioritise regions most threatened by environmental degradation and assess the impact of our interventions on ecosystem services such as biodiversity regeneration, soil replenishment, biomass improvement, and carbon storage,” he said.
Through leveraging data layers such as water dynamics, vegetative growth rate, carbon levels, biodiversity indices, and forest cover change over time, the tool also seeks to support companies with their reporting under the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) as well as other emerging frameworks, Restor said.
“[Restor Enterprise] will allow us to enhance our measurement, management, and transparency initiatives to make an even deeper impact with the natural capital assets we manage and in the communities where we operate,” said Sarah Chapman, global chief sustainability officer at Manulife.
Companies and financial institutions face growing expectations to contribute to biodiversity conservation, as Target 15 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework urges them to regularly monitor, assess, and disclose their risks, dependencies, and impacts.
As organisations step up their efforts to align with disclosure standards, demand for robust nature data has increased over the last few months, with financial institutions, in particular, citing the lack of information on nature-related impacts at a portfolio level as hampering their efforts.
By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com
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