NAD Roundup #3
Come for the science…stay for the adventure!
Thanks so much to all of you who contributed to the New Atlantis Gitcoin Grant — the results are in and it was a great success! We were incredibly heartened by all of the support and want to send a big shoutout from us to the ReFi and DeSci communities who really stepped out for one another. We were thrilled to see New Atlantis in the company of so many other amazing projects in the Top 10. (For those of you unfamiliar with how Gitcoin grants work, please check out our last Roundup)
Now, on to the New Atlantis news for this week. We have taken the first steps towards building our open marine biodiversity analytics platform which will be the foundation not only for insights into the ecological health of Marine Protected Areas, but also provide a way for MPAs to potentially generate blue carbon and, eventually, biodiversity credits.
From our Oceans Team: Jay is in the middle of processing thousands of metagenome assembled genomes reconstructed from Tara Ocean’s datasets. This is the start of creating a unified metagenome database representing the collected works from the top researchers contributing to the field. LFG!
Positive news from around the globe
Nature has a seat at the table! The United States designated a special envoy for biodiversity and water resources. As reported in the Washington Post, Monica Medina, who is taking on this role, said “There’s a direct connection between biodiversity loss and instability in a lot of parts of the world. It’s not just about nature for nature’s sake. I think it is about people.”
Community Spotlight
Daniella Pozo, a freshman at Brown University, wrote a beautiful essay on why the mission of New Atlantis is meaningful to her. You can read it here.
What we’re reading, what we are listening to, who we are following
101:
This podcast episode — What is ReFi — takes a look at the origin of the movement, why it’s taking off at this moment in time, and serves as a good reminder that money is a myth that can be redefined to include nature.
A very eye-opening opinion piece in the New York Times: To Really Understand the Ocean, We Need to Go Back in Time.
201:
This paper from Nature on per species risk metrics and other derived instruments for Biodiversity accounting.
An article detailing the actions we need to take to enhance blue carbon as a natural climate solution.
What we need:
The Coalition for Private-sector Investment published a report in 2021 that got all of us here at New Atlantis even more fired up about what we are working on (if that were even possible!) While in 2021 $851 billion was spent on climate change, in 2020 only $18 billion was spent on slowing the rate of species extinctions.
And yet we know that not only is biodiversity critical in regulating earth’s atmosphere — it’s also the foundation for our food web and pivotal in mitigating the effects of climate change.
Enabling marine biodiversity markets is a big, complex, and difficult goal. We cannot do this alone and the oceans are running out of time. So please join us! Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord,
