Swiss Verein Incorporated for the NDA

Political consensus is behaving inverse to population growth. The more people, the less chance to reach consensus. 

There were approximately 194 independent states recognized by the United Nations, and it is likely that most of these countries have at least one minister or official responsible for environmental issues. What is the chance that they agree in a state when resources are unevenly or better unfairly distributed? What is the chance that anybody agrees in a time when opinions are as diverse as the Internet is wide?

Politics means to find consensus to improve everybody’s life and maintain human survival. However, the Covid crisis demonstrated our pre digital systems’ inability to coordinate efforts. Did this involuntarily test trigger the alarm bells? Did something change? 

In November 2022, the globally leading Climate Conference COP was attended by 33,000 delegates. The number of entrepreneurs who are developing and scaling solutions to prevent the climate catastrophe are systematically left out from the discussion. Also, investors are not invited to this event. How can we expect change when the most critical stakeholders are not part of the discussion? Every industry has been disrupted by startups, which were supported by investors to execute their plans faster. Why should politics or nature conservation behave differently? Instead of finding, connecting, and scaling solutions, we are in love with scientific articles or colorful marketing PDFs.   

I wonder, have we saved or taken more trees with the publishing of papers around forest protection. There are 287 different initiatives registered with the UN Climate Initiatives Platform (CIP). How can this be? There is just one climate, how can there be 287 teams working on the same cause? Collaboration today means how many logos you can put under your work from credible organizations. Initiatives are popping up left, right and center. But what is their value if they are not connected, not following a grand and measurable plan?

Natural capital or nature-based solutions are heavily discussed. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report counts 3,676 pages. Not a light read with an almost cynical title: “Summary for Policymakers”. The report is backed up by lots of scientific data but provides little implementation guidance. The advocacy or the creation of new solutions (product) is not in the job description of a scientist. It is also not part of the responsibility of politicians. Corporates are the last stakeholder groups to trigger change if the status quo is profitable. So where is the change coming from? The tech elite seems to be busy building platforms with little interest to protect vanishing biodiversity. It’s a question of setting the right priorities.

Conservation today is like investing in the stock market without the existence of stock prices. We are missing natural capital infrastructure. What type of infrastructure do we need, if protecting nature is a priority on our political agendas? On page 1,936 in the IPCC report it states: “The advancement of citizen science programs has greatly facilitated better monitoring of forest resources, including invasive floral and faunal species”. So what are we waiting for?  

The Nature Data Alliance (“NDA”) was established by nature tech and project developers, and speakers at the NOAH Conference 2021 and 2022. We seek to connect the most relevant climate change mitigation products. The objective is to derive sustainable land use decisions backed by transparent and open-source data. But data has never been enough, we need systems, digital systems. 

85% of the key biodiversity areas (“KBAs”) or 1.5 billion hectares are governed by indigenous people's land rights. How can conservation efforts exclude this most important stakeholder group? The environmental challenge is political. It always has been. Nature conservation has too long been using the symptoms of badly aging capitalism for fundraising. We must change the rules of the game if we want another outcome. Two thirds of carbon sequestration is happening through forests and oceans. If we lose our oceans to plastic and our forests to human developments, it's game over, with or without the 5,400 corporate pledges.

The NDA is developing an Indigenous People Operating System (IPOS). We seek to establish the natural equilibrium for billions of nature hectares and marine systems. The functionality of the platform aims to include local communities in remote places, coordinate billions of little tasks, provide a livelihood, and bring protection. 

The NDA is a holistic platform, an open working project inviting all stakeholders to contribute. As a Swiss registered non-for-profit, we are focused on providing tools and systems to prevent nature loss. We believe in three pillars for the IPOS: community, data, and financing (long term contract securitization). One leads to the other. 

Stop the competition, start working together and build a globally recognized environmental KPI dashboard for all nature hectares. Then nature conservation has a chance. 

Connecting market leading solutions through an API backend integration versus building new solutions.

Concretely, through cadasta.org, the NDA will support communities to establish and register their land rights. Once the legal framework provides certainty, communities will invest time and resources into their local ecosystems. Agriculture and agroforestry knowledge and solutions come from to name a few Terraformation, Plantix, Apollo Agriculture, and Justdiggit targeting small hold farmers. The collection of nature KPIs and a real-time alarm system are brought by citizen science tools including Cybertracker, Rainforest Connection, and the leading nature tech solutions: FlintPro (MullionGroup), Remote Sensing Solutions Group, Terrapulse, Space4Goods, Space Intelligence, and Skydweller, amongst others.  Once there is regular data reporting established, projects can get planned, implemented, and monitored.

System change is tough, but finding, connecting, and scaling the best already existing tools to one solution is the hope we have, to prevent the climate catastrophe. 

We look forward to partner with you as @WEDONTHAVETIME.org

Nature Data Alliance Members.

https://www.noah-conference.com/nature-data-alliance/