🐘 EarthAcre - Amplifying community knowledge with technology, to power long-term nature stewardship [BA+ 2023 Cohort]
TLDR; EarthAcre is building the technology backbone for a more transparent, equitable nature-market - to drive impact and trust for local landowners and corporate buyers alike.
The Problem: As the need to expand the world’s sustainability efforts beyond “carbon-tunnel vision” gains recognition, concepts such as nature and biodiversity credits have been building momentum, from small scale NGOs to large organizations such as the World Economic Forum.
But without the right infrastructure in place, the nature markets bear many of the same risks and challenges faced in the carbon markets.
What types of risks and challenges, you may ask?
To put this into perspective, let’s first imagine what it takes to sell a single biodiversity credit, equivalent in this case to one hectare of biodiverse land.
First, you need land, and if you’re not the landowner yourself, you’ll need the permission of the landowner to use that land.
To prove that your land has biodiversity value - or that you’ll be creating more biodiversity value through restorative activities, like replanting native species - you’ll need a reliable way to measure and verify the ecological status of the land, with third-party auditors. You’ll also need to upload your data to a reputable registry, to record that data and formally “create” your credit.
To make the economics of engaging with the auditor and registry work, you’ll probably need more than a few hectares of land - so you might have to coordinate amongst a number (maybe even hundreds) of landowners - the community.
This all takes coordination at a high level, and a governance structure to determine how the shares of the biodiversity credit revenues are split between landowner.
When the time comes for a sale is made to a buyer looking to create nature-positive impact (or when revenues are released/actualized after biodiversity “uplift” is proven), the revenues are disbursed to the local community, according to their respective contributions.
That is, if everything goes as described above.
Here are some of the things that might go wrong in this scenario:
❌ The biodiversity value of the land is wrongly estimated, because the third party auditor is using manual ecological surveying techniques which are subject to their skillset.
❌ The land title changes hands during the course of the project, and the biodiversity payouts go into the wrong bank account.
❌ The project coordinator is dishonest, and does not disburse the revenues to the local community at all, unknown to the buyer of the biodiversity credit. When this gets reported in media, public sentiment of the market is eroded, and the buyer’s reputation is damaged.
Biodiversity credits have incredible potential to empower communities to continue their cultural practices, protect the natural environments they live in, and to prevent the consolidation of land and displacement of local peoples. But for them to exist with public trust, all of the above points need to be addressed.
The solution: EarthAcre is building the transparency infrastructure the nature and biodiversity credit markets need, to amplify community-led, collective action for nature.
The technology they’re developing includes:
✔️ Lidar-based drone measurement technology to map biodiversity across landscapes, in conjunction with other data sources;
✔️ A workflow and transaction management software, for (1) project coordinators to digitize communications with individual landowners, operations, and recordkeeping, and for (2) buyers to track their disbursements, and be assured that the nature-related revenues are trickling down to the local community.
As their first use case, EarthAcre is working across 50,000 acres in Kenya (~20,000 hectares), facilitating the sale of both carbon credits and options for biodiversity credits.
Meet the team: Bringing together a wide range of skill sets and expertise, the EarthAcre team is intensely driven by their vision: A world where communities around the world live in and among thriving natural ecosystems and biodiversity.
To read more about the team’s experience and background, check out their website here.
We sit down with the founders to learn more about the company.
💡Biodiversity Accelerator+: Tell us about the first project you’re working on. Why is it so important that carbon and biodiversity credit revenues be brought into and shared amongst the community?
➡️Patita Nkamunu, Kenya Lead: Our first projects are in Southern Kenya, on lands that are facing tremendous pressure. The pandemic reduced ecotourism revenue, vital for the local Masai community. In many areas, the community land has now been subdivided into small plots under individual ownership, increasing the urgency to provide direct revenue to landowners. Without support, the land faces a very real risk of sale and conversion to uses like agriculture, and in fact this is already happening in adjacent lands.
We need to make the sustainable stewardship of land a viable economic choice for landowners, where protecting & uplifting nature results in positive cash flow for communities and healthy ecosystems are recognized as some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.
💡Biodiversity Accelerator+: What distinguishes your technologies from existing products in the market?
➡️ Yasha (Yakov) Portnoy, CTO: EarthAcre’s technology focuses on managing nature based projects from an ecosystem centric point of view. We operate with the understanding that a successful nature based project doesn't necessarily lead to a healthy ecosystem. But a healthy ecosystem always leads to healthy ecosystem services like carbon capture, biodiversity sources, and others. That in turn leads to successful, longterm, nature based projects.
This is why, unlike a lot of today’s focus on carbon measurement, EarthAcre evaluates ecosystems holistically to ensure that the human interventions maintain and restore the ecosystems that the projects are on. EarthAcre tech combines ecosystem measurements, equitable & transparent benefit distribution directly to individuals as part of the community stewarding the ecosystem so that we can successfully protect our planet.
All our technologies are geared towards achieving this end— combining culturally appropriate group land management practices informed by communities’ knowledge of their ecosystems with direct benefits for individuals to advance ecosystem stewardship of nature.
💡Biodiversity Accelerator+: What are you most excited for in the next 12 months?
➡️ Viraj Sikand, CEO: We recently sold options on biodiversity assets for 50,000 acres, arguably one of the largest biodiversity asset transactions in the world to date. This liberates funds immediately for the protection of biodiversity on our pilot site, upon which biodiversity assets will be generated that represent positive results in biodiversity, measured based on a methodology developed by the Harvard University’s Davies Lab. The purchase of these assets enables corporations to participate in the conservation of a unique ecosystem and provide direct income to indigenous landowners, recognizing them for their critical role in sustaining a remarkable landscape.
However, this is just the beginning for us. With the successful adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (often referred to as the 'Paris Agreement for Biodiversity'), momentum is building and businesses are taking proactive steps to measure and mitigate their impacts on nature. Over the next 12 months, we are really excited to scale this up. By creating a bridge between finance and nature, we think there is tremendous potential to unlock the inherent value of biodiversity and empower communities to protect their own natural heritage.
💡Biodiversity Accelerator+: If you could ask for anything from the audience reading this today, what would it be?
➡️ Mark Tracy, Chairman: Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse is a top global risk, as categorized by the World Economic Forum, and threatens 50% of the global economy. We always welcome introductions to collaborators, media outlets and corporations who are looking for innovative ways to address this problem together.
Want to learn more about EarthAcre? Check out their website, Linkedin, or Instagram for more updates.
You can also learn more about the Biodiversity Accelerator+ at our website today.