💡Investment Notes: Why we invested in Natrx
Technology for coastal and wetland resilience and restoration
In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report released this year, scientists warned that even in optimistic greenhouse gas emission scenarios, sea levels will continue to rise - the outcome of melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms.
As sea level rise, so does the risk of coastal erosion. When waves reach further inland, they pose a threat to coastal assets and communities. “The danger [of climate change] is especially acute for nearly 900 million people who live in coastal zones at low elevations,” UN Secretary-General Mr Antonio Guterres warned the United Nations Security Council earlier this year. “That’s one out of ten people on earth.”
For governments conscious of the issue, and for the corporates responsible for anthropogenic emissions, the need is clear: In addition to implementing climate mitigation solutions to reduce the extent of the problem, we must also simultaneously implement climate adaptation solutions to protect our coasts.
Introducing Natrx, a startup based in the United States, which uses technology to protect coastal shorelines and restore wetlands. Here’s why we invested:
1. A highly effective and coherent end-to-end coastal resilience solution, made affordable
Unlike the traditional installation approach of seawalls or breakwaters built from rock, Natrx’s product and service approach is three-fold:
First, Natrx uses proprietary wind and wave models to estimate erosion and the type of interventions needed across a specific coast - allowing clients to anticipate coastal damage before it occurs, rather than simply reacting to it, and also allowing them to prioritise spending to optimise adaptation outcomes.
Second, based on this intelligence, Natrx creates habitat-specific modules known as ExoForms™ that are not only more resilient, and safer to install than traditional breakwaters, but that also work more effectively to do the job - all with lower associated carbon emissions.
Pictured above: Natrx’s Dry Forming™ technology provides the ability to move from digital design to physical ExoForm™ structure within 1 day. Dry Forming enables the unprecedented ability to optimize and deliver ExoForms™ at scale.
Pictured above: The difference between Natrx and traditional rock breakwaters after Hurricane Laura, a category 4 hurricane on the Louisana coast.
Third, Natrx provides post-installation analytics, to provide evidence of the success of the installation and address any ongoing concerns.
2. Game changing speed of permitting and on-site deployment, to protect coasts rapidly and at scale
Projects using Natrx’s ExoForms™ can reduce their permitting timeline significantly, compared to those using seawalls and heavy rock breakwaters, for two main reasons:
Regulators and resource agencies are concerned with the environmental impacts of coastal installations, as most organisms cannot
traverse the impermeable barrier created by the heavy construction technique. Because Natrx’s ExoForms™ allow for permeability, water exchange, fish passage, benthic habitat creation, and other co-benefits, they do not pose such challenges for regulators.
Site access typically crosses wetlands or riparian areas on land, or it requires installers to mobilize barges and tugs for water-based access. It is not uncommon to see a project require a mile or more of dredging to bring in a deep draft barge full of heavy rock to a site in shallow areas. In this example, the customer would need to obtain additional permits for access dredging and a separate set of permits for the disposal of the dredge material. ExoForms can be tailored to utilize lightweight equipment from land and water to minimize and in some cases effectively eliminate access disturbance entirely.
With these permitting advantages, Natrx projects have been able to reduce their permitting timelines by 12x, from 2 years to 60 days.
Once they have their permits in hand, Natrx can also deploy their units very quickly at their target site - For example, in their collaboration with Native Shorelines to protect at least 700 linear feet of at-risk homeowner land along Clubfoot Creek, Natrx created and installed a total of 233 custom units that fit in with existing coastal infrastructure, all within a single week.
Pictured above: The first QuickReef/ExoForm combo units deployed at Clubfoot Creek.
3. Strong climate outcomes, from both wetland protection and improved manufacturing
Globally, eroding coastal wetlands already emit 1.9 GtCO2e annually from the decomposition of organic carbon - a problem that is only going to worsen from the 33% of coastal wetlands which are expected to disappear by the end of the century, if solutions such as Natrx are not implemented to prevent further coastal erosion.
In addition to preventing excessive carbon emissions from wetlands degradation, Natrx technology also produces less carbon in its own manufacturing process, compared to traditional breakwaters. A single ExoForm™ only emits 28 tCO2e as compared to 325 tCO2e typically emitted. That’s already a stunning drop of 91%! The Natrx team continues to look for ways to further improve the carbon footprint of their product, such as by prototyping their ExoForms™ to include the use of biochar.
4. Applicability of their product and services to promote robust biodiversity protection and restoration.
Going beyond its climate impacts, Natrx have also adapted their offerings for biodiversity protection and restoration.
One example is their joint $9M coral regrowth project with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Conservation International, the Hawaiʻi Division of Aquatic Resources, the ocean engineering firm Oceanit, and workforce development nonprofit ClimbHI. This project comes at a critical time, where many reefs have been so degraded that they are no longer able to provide habitat for species such as parrot fish and other seaweed eaters.
Working and consulting with local stakeholders, Natrx is applying its technology to create a REEFrame to support and assist the natural process of coral regrowth and to build two permanent coral nurseries.
Pictured above: Preliminary visualization of a portion of a REEFrame, hosting “Corals of opportunity,” which are living coral colonies dislodged by storms, ship groundings, anchor drags or other disturbances, attached to the structures for temporary keeping until they are later transplanted to areas lacking coral. The REEFrame also hosts fish that keep reef surfaces clean for corals to flourish.
In another project for Shell at Hell Hole Bayou in Louisiana, constant scouring episodes eroded the bayou and also threatening existing critical infrastructure. Natrx created custom ExoForm structures to respond to the bayou erosion and promote wetland creation. They constructed channel closure structures safely and efficiently within 1 day over water, and immediately slowed water flow to promote beneficial sedimentation. This work produced potential for new growth of 30,000 oysters - equivalent to 271 million gallons of water filter potential, with many cascading effects for the wider ecosystem.
For people, nature, and the planet, Natrx is providing a vital solution with dexterity and high efficacy. We are proud to be backing the team behind Natrx, as they bring their experience on building businesses, data science, and coastal engineering solutions to enable coastal resilience at scale.
Thanks for reading! Interested to learn more about Natrx? Read more about Natrx at their website and Linkedin, as well as their feature on the Silverstrand Linkedin.
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