While many of us don’t often think about it, much of our lives and livelihoods are dependent on nature and the resources it provides. From the clean water and pollinators that provide the food we eat, to crucial natural compounds needed to produce medicines, pristine beaches that foster tourism, to the clothes we buy and materials in our homes.
Research from PwC shows that over half of the economy (approximately 55%) is moderately or highly dependent on nature – equivalent to $58 trillion. The ongoing crisis of nature and biodiversity loss, which has seen nearly 1 million animal species being placed at risk of extinction, represents a near-existential threat to the economy.
In the past few years, policymakers and business leaders have begun to take action. Countries around the world agreed to halt and reverse nature loss through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), while new tools and regulations were released to guide businesses to monitor and manage biodiversity impact, including the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and Science Based Targets Network (SBTN).
As we seek to implement these frameworks, stakeholders will need new tech to better measure their activities’ impact on biodiversity in real time to know that their actions have their intended effects. Today’s measurement methods can’t fulfil this and can be inefficient and biased. We need to bring biodiversity measurement and monitoring into the 21st century.
The problem with measuring biodiversity
The ambitious goals set by TNFD and GBF present businesses with a challenge. In order to accurately monitor, report, and manage their biodiversity impact, they have to measure something that is exceedingly complex and interconnected. Unlike the “simple” tCO2e metric for greenhouse gases, biodiversity is inherently context and location dependent, complex, and non-fungible.
There is also no single unified metric for biodiversity, which can lead to inconsistencies in assessment and make it harder to compare different data sets. Plus, many of the pre-existing solutions to measure biodiversity are labour-intensive, time-consuming, and biased. This has resulted in poor availability of data in many areas of the world, making it harder for businesses to understand and reduce their impact.
Partly due to the challenges with existing biodiversity data collection tools, biodiversity has historically been poorly monitored and reported on. A recent review by the Global Benchmarking Alliance found that only 5% of major companies had performed an assessment of how their companies’ activities have affected nature. With thousands of organisations facing biodiversity reporting for the first time, many may not have the internal expertise to adequately manage and report on biodiversity.
Clearly, companies need better tools and technologies to accurately and proactively measure their impact on the natural environment.
Bringing measurement into the 21st Century
As technology has evolved, new solutions have emerged to solve this problem. So such as eDNA. This works by sampling small amounts of water, soil, or air in a particular area that can be analysed for insights on the types of species that live there, from bacteria to large mammals, all of which are needed to enable healthy ecosystems to thrive. This can help businesses accurately and reliably track biodiversity over time, helping businesses make decisions on how to manage their natural capital.
Earth observation using drones, manned aerial vehicles, and satellites is another powerful tool for non-marine, surface-level environments. Various data layers, including multi and hyperspectral imaging, radar, and LiDAR, can be combined and analyzed to map and monitor ecosystems over large areas. This is a highly scalable tool to help monitor biodiversity at a global level but is most effective when calibrated with accurate ground-truth data like eDNA.
AI is being leveraged across all of these tools to analyse data and inform biodiversity insights. It enables scientists and researchers to accurately parse large amounts of data from measuring sources such as camera traps, acoustic sensors, eDNA, and satellite data, as well as informing them where to focus and collect more data overall. With the ability to both collect and process biodiversity data automatically in real-time, this technology has the potential to vastly improve the scalability of biodiversity data collection and analysis.
Models must be trained on large volumes of high-quality data. This is a challenge, as currently available public databases are often incomplete, outdated, or limited in coverage and completeness. However, this also presents a significant opportunity for companies with access to proprietary data or the ability to generate new, high-quality biodiversity data.
Biodiversity: the next frontier in sustainability
With nature in crisis, measuring the impact of human activity on biodiversity has never been more essential. Biodiversity is rapidly becoming the next frontier in sustainability management, and the market for biodiversity data is exploding, driven by both new and existing markets.
However, new technologies are needed to help close the biodiversity data gap and make biodiversity monitoring accessible and effective. Businesses should embrace new technological solutions to move in line with incoming frameworks like the GBF and TNFD and manage nature-related risks and opportunities.
