Attempting Biodiversity’s ‘E Pluribus Unum’
The global biodiversity crisis is happening alarmingly quickly. Species are going extinct at a pace 100–1000 times faster than what is considered the “natural extinction rate.” Looming above this year’s Biodiversity COP, the Living Planet Report 2022 released earlier this year warned that a devastating drop in numbers of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish since 1970 constitutes an undeniably clear sign of the stark state of nature today. Some scientists have deemed biodiversity loss more significant than the climate crisis. Many have made the case that both should be tackled together. Transformative action to reverse the destruction of biodiversity is indispensable as the UN climate conference runs its 27th installment and biodiversity COP started its 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties for Biodiversity on December 7.
Open data and rapid comprehensive action.
But how can we tackle a challenge as complex as the global biodiversity crisis?
An accumulation of projects that enable decision makers such as local communities, governments, indigenous groups, international organizations, NGOs, and the private sector to access comprehensive, up-to-date, near real-time data that can quickly be translated into actionable advice is currently underway. Vizzuality sits right at the centre, contributing back-end or front-end development, assisting in science, design or running communication tasks respective to each project. If challenges are diverse, so are our professional endeavours! Read on to learn more about the projects we have worked on and how they will help us turn these many challenges into ones we can overcome.
Fauna and Flora.
Let’s begin with the obvious candidates. Animals are one of the most crucial and charismatic parts of any ecosystem. To truly understand their behaviour, habitats, numbers and conservation needs, Wildlife Insights is capturing thousands of images of wildlife each day. The largest camera-trap database in the world, the project led by Conservation International provides reliable, frequent and up-to-date information on rarely observed species.
Forests may be easier to monitor than animals since they don’t move around much, but they are still constantly changing, thanks mainly to human impact from deforestation and wildfires, for instance. The World Resources Institute (WRI)’s Global Forest Watch provides data and tools for monitoring forests worldwide. Decision-makers can focus their attention on forest conservation where it is most needed.
The proposals at COP15 clearly underscore the importance of ecosystems that can protect biodiversity and tackle climate change at the same time. One great candidate to ensure the health of such ecosystems is Global Mangrove Watch, also led by Conservation International. Much like forests, mangroves are critical homes to vast amounts of wildlife, but their value goes far beyond that; they are also one of Earth’s major carbon sinks. They additionally benefit climate resilience by preventing more than $65 billion in property damages to some 15 million people every year as they mitigate risks related to storms and floods. As the primary global monitoring tool on mangrove conservation status and extent, Global Mangrove Watch provides near-real-time information based on individual users’ needs.
Climate Change.
Addressing climate change is a very daunting task with many different facets. Biodiversity and climate change are closely intertwined, so paying attention to climate progress should be on all biodiversity conservationists’ agendas. The one tool that allows you to quickly understand how the world as a whole and individual countries respectively are progressing with their climate targets is Climate Watch, led by WRI. Tracking the climate progress of every nation on Earth, Climate Watch is an online platform that employs open climate data, visualizations and resources to gather insights on national and global progress on climate change.
Change at sea.
“Water matters,” The Nature Conservancy’s COP15 guide reminds us. The oceans cover 71% of planet Earth, yet roughly only 20% has been mapped or explored. While specific marine topics such as fishing have their own databases, WRI led the creation of a centralized, intuitive data platform for the ocean. Ocean Watch informs policymakers to make better-informed decisions about sustainable ocean management. Now, policymakers will be able to access reliable, up-to-date data and make informed decisions on sustainable ocean management.
But even if we learn more about the state of the oceans at large, the world continues to slide closer to the brink of a lifeless sea. Sky Truth and Oceana have come in to fill this gap with Global Fishing Watch, a platform to publicly share knowledge about human fishing activity to enable fair and sustainable use of our oceans. Proof that it can work? In collaboration with Indonesia’s government, Global Fishing Watch identified fishing vessels that violated their three-month allowance at sea and operated in regions beyond their permission. Indonesian policy confronting such illegal and unreported fishing activities in its waters has declined by more than 90%, while total fishing has been reduced by 25%.
The bigger picture.
The need for immediate, effective biodiversity conservation action has not only been expressed by international institutions and national governments. Far from it! It now involves a far greater set of stakeholders worldwide, ranging from NGOs to local communities, indigenous groups, and many more.
They all encounter a similar challenge: the conservation science and data landscape is remarkably complex and extensive. All this data needs to be analyzed, evaluated, and summarized quickly and efficiently, to enable smooth, effective conservation action.
Marxan has been built and updated by The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, and Vizzuality to do just that. The world’s leading spatial conservation planning tool is set to broaden its user base and include anyone, anywhere, to make evidence-based conservation planning decisions. In short: this is conservation action through geospatial data built for everyone without wasting time!
But how do we even know how much biodiversity we need to save and how much of a total area we have protected? While Marxan synthesizes complexity succinctly, the Half-Earth project serves as the overall benchmark for biodiversity conservation on land and at sea. Based on the call “to protect half the land and sea to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis,” and supported by initiatives such as 30x30, the E.O. Wilson Foundation’s core project depicts the global patterns and progress made in biodiversity conservation, mapping and reducing human impact, and expanding protected areas. Visualizing biodiversity richness and rarity at a 1km resolution, Half-Earth sheds a precise light on which areas are in the most dire need for urgent conservation efforts and allows decision-makers to direct their immediate attention accordingly.
Our very own creation, LandGriffon.
Of course, the private sector also plays a huge role in the biodiversity arena. Frankly, private companies have little alternative but to take note. The 2020 World Economic Forum’s Nature Risk Rising Report suggested that $44 trillion of economic value generation was “moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services, and is therefore vulnerable to degradation of ecosystems and habitat loss.” At the time, that number accounted for more than half of the entire world’s GDP.
To address this issue, private corporations have often focused on their in-house operations in their sustainability strategies. However, the vast majority of biodiversity loss and emissions occur along their supply chains. Luckily, thanks to newly developed geospatial open data software, these impacts could finally be reduced.
Together with Satelligence, and under the guidance of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Trase Initiative, we built LandGriffon with precisely this goal in mind. LandGriffon empowers companies to map their Scope 3 sources, meaning the sourcing, transportation, and production of their raw materials along their entire value chain. This way, we estimate a company’s true environmental impacts and empower them to plan strategies for real change. LandGriffon works for any company, wherever they may be on their journey to sustainability.
Out of many, one to overcome.
Being able to process data and information in near real-time through interfaces that are understandable and easy to use will allow a wide variety of users in the conservation movement to make progress on the many individual yet interconnected components of the biodiversity crisis. As decision-makers address each problem in a more precise and targeted manner, they will be able to do their part in mastering the one complex, overarching challenge of reversing the biodiversity crisis and preserving ecological diversity across our planet.
Through the large number and great diversity of our projects, we hope that Vizzuality can play a key role in turning the many different environmental challenges our planet faces into one great opportunity to overcome the entire global biodiversity crisis. Let’s do it together!
Thank you Alexander Wowra for writing this blog and Teona Teodorescu for designing the visuals.
