The Art of Biodiversity
The soil is our soul. Biodiversity & nature is our customer. Data and science is our language. New tech & art is our vehicle. We feel equally at home in a lab, in data spreadsheets, or in a farmer’s field wearing muddy boots. Become a PONY EARTHer and join us at http://www.ponyearth.com.
What is the mission of PONY EARTH?
The mission of PONY EARTH is to finance the recovery of agricultural biodiversity worldwide for a resilient food production and to reduce the effects of climate change on our planet and in turn the human body.
The PONY EARTH Biodiversity Standard scientifically contextualizes environmental micro and macro data to make agricultural biodiversity measurable and financially quantifiable. We make biodiversity an asset class.
Dating back to 2004 the OECD stated “creating markets for biodiversity is part of a public policy shift … It attempts to harness the creative power of entrepreneurs and direct it toward enhancing the quality of the environment” (Source: OECD Handbook of Market Creation in Biodiversity)
What’s the story behind PONY EARTH?
The soil is our soul.
Biodiversity & nature is our customer.
Data and science is our language. New tech & art is our vehicle.
We feel equally at home in a lab, in data spreadsheets, or in a farmer’s field wearing muddy boots.
Rene Zimmerman — who happens to also be the founder of the farm-to-fork concept, Waldjungfrau — had the idea of regenerating conventional farmland at scale.
The seed for the concept being the question posed by Dr. Sabine: ‘Why not use the mechanics of NFTs as a highly scaleable investment vehicle for social impact projects?’
The idea was later validated by MIT Research Scientist, John Clippinger. Since the first pony sighting, an artwork has been created everyday — 8760 in total. The sale of these artworks, that we have dubbed — ReArt (regenerative art) — will go towards financing the regeneration of agricultural biodiversity worldwide.
After extensive research we organized the first PONY (un)conference on the pilot living lab at Waldjungfrau on October 30, 2021. In February 2022 PONY EARTH Biodiversity GmbH was born and already received grants by the Vienna Business Agency, AWS, and FFG.
What is agricultural biodiversity?
“Agricultural biodiversity is a broad term that includes all components of biological diversity of relevance to food and agriculture, and all components of biological diversity that constitute the agro-ecosystem.” (Source: Convention on Biological Diversity by the UN Environment Program).
“Conserving, sustainably using and restoring biodiversity is vital to achieving … human health, climate-change mitigation and adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and water and food security. The associated economic values can be considerable: for example, the annual market value of crops dependent on animal pollination ranges from USD 235 billion to USD 577 billion” (Source: OECD Biodiversity: Finance and the Economic and Business Case for Action).
The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 alone has committed that “at least €20 billion a year should be unlocked for spending on nature” (Source: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/biodiversity/financing_en.htm).
Agricultural biodiversity is diminishing at an unprecedented rate.
