Nature conservation poses many challenges – but there are also plenty of opportunities, particularly when innovative technologies come in, as you’ll hear in this DLD Nature panel discussion moderated by Eleanor O’Keeffe (Edelman).
Leveraging AI and data analytics could lead to new economic frameworks that put a proper value on biodiversity.
“As long as we treat nature as essentially a free good, conservation will only ever be a sticking plaster.”, Matthew Gould (Zoological Society of London) argues. “We need reliable data and metrics that can underpin an economic framework in which we properly value nature.
That’s exactly what the Living Planet Index aims to provide. The database measures biodiversity decline and has been adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Compiling the data, and making sense of it, has been largely a manual process, which can now be automated with the help of artificial intelligence and remote sensors in the field, Robin Freeman notes, who manages the Living Planet Index project at the ZSL.
“There’s this opportunity right now to vastly change the way we gather data for what has happened to nature, and then begin to build models to understand why that has happened and make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future”, he says.
Jonathan Ledgard, founder of the Interspecies Money initiative, aims to give animals digital identities and financial value to ensure their survival, especially in emerging economies.
He describes a pilot project with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, where an AI model was trained to identify their interests and assign a financial valuation, demonstrating the feasibility of the concept.
Make sure to watch the video for details about these fascinating projects.
