Episode 23: Navigating nature tech solutions for business featuring the NatureTech Alliance

The transcript highlights below have been edited for clarity.

Mark Lee

We're recording this episode today right after COP 16, the UN biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia. We're going to explore a new report from a partnership called the NatureTech Alliance, called ‘The nature tech revolution, the tools to move from do-no-harm to nature-positive’. All of the people on the panel today with me had a hand in creating that report. Laura, tell us more about your company NatureMetrics and the Alliance.

Laura Plant

NatureMetrics is a nature technology company, and we use cutting edge science to try and quantify nature, which is quite a tricky thing to do. The primary technology that we use is called environmental DNA or eDNA. It works off the fact that all living things leave tiny fragments of DNA behind them as they move through the environment. Our clients take samples of water, soil or air, and we identify and analyze the fragments of DNA that have been left behind and tell them what species were there. It's a bit like forensics for nature and it produces a wealth of data for those companies. I've been involved in the NatureTech Alliance since its inception in Davos and am delighted to publish the white paper that was launched at COP16.

Mark Lee

Tim, I would love to hear a bit about your role at Salesforce and how you plugged in with this cohort?

Tim Christophersen

I lead the nature team at Salesforce and also coordinate our international sustainability activities outside of the Americas, based in Europe. I came to this work because two years ago we started to branch out and make more nature-based solution investments and a year and a half ago we launched our nature positive strategy at Salesforce, which includes a $100 million climate justice grant fund, a commitment to purchase a million tons of high-quality blue carbon and obviously also to assess and then mitigate our own nature footprint.

We've done two very in-depth assessments on that, one thanks to ERM. We're still in the process of understanding and then appropriately addressing this complex topic called biodiversity or nature. As one of the world's leading technology companies, it was a natural avenue for us to take the route of technology to understand how we can, not only do this for us, but preferably also help the 200,000 Salesforce customers, many of whom will have nature on their list of material topics. So, this is how we came to work with these wonderful people and be involved in the NatureTech Alliance white paper.

Mark Lee

Amy, what is Planet? And what do you do there?

Amy Rosenthal

I'm the Senior Global Director for Conservation Initiatives at Planet Labs, PBC. We're delighted to be a member of the NatureTech Alliance. So what is Planet? It's a public benefit corporation that designs, builds and launches shoebox sized satellites and puts them into low Earth orbit. And with those satellites, we image the whole world every day, making change visible, accessible and actionable for folks here on Earth. The reason why I'm here is because we stand on this precipice, ready to develop, build and then activate a near real time and global system for monitoring biodiversity. That's important for communities and countries and businesses. So that we know where our interfaces with nature are, how we're affecting nature, the outcomes and the life support systems we depend on. And then what we can do to bend that curve from ecosystem degradation to a nature positive pathway.

COP16 outcomes and implications for business

Mark Lee

Can I get a highlight from each of you from COP16?

Matt Haddon

So my takeaway was really one of momentum and corporate energy. There was something like 1000 to 1200 corporate representatives in Montreal, which was the previous iteration of the global biodiversity COP two years ago. There were 40 before that, so a marked uptick. There were probably 3000 to 4000 in Cali, of a total cohort of around 20,000 people. So, a lot of energy, a lot of companies leaning in to play their part in tackling some of these huge challenges that we face around biodiversity loss and implications.

Mark Lee

And Amy, what did you find? And what did you learn?

Amy Rosenthal

This was the biggest biodiversity COP we've ever had. There's been a circus around climate for a number of years now, and this was the time where that Green Zone, the area around where the negotiations happened, had this incredible richness of activity, events, commitments, substance that we hadn't seen before. So beyond being the biggest ever, we also saw increasing convergence within negotiations and beyond them on what we need to measure and track as relates to nature, which is a good thing, we need to land in the same places and be speaking the same language.

We saw new mechanisms come online through those negotiations for financing biodiversity and nature outcomes that we all care about, and we all want to be part of. But I think the disappointment from my perspective was that we're still lacking the commitment on the part of many nations to bring together the resources we really need to fill that natural deficit we face today.

Mark Lee

Countries were supposed to come forward with their plans to deliver on the biodiversity framework that was agreed two years ago and most nations have failed to do so. We need a different level of commitment and pathways to deliver on the promise of the framework. Tim, what’s your point of view on the event?

Tim Christophersen

Early in my career I worked for the Convention on Biodiversity Secretariat for five years, so I helped organize three COPs and this was almost 20 years ago now. But at that time there were no businesses, there was nobody really, except governments paying attention and pharmaceutical industry because access and benefit sharing genetic resources was already on the agenda then, with the Nagoya Protocol, for example. But compared to that, it's a complete sea change that we are experiencing, and I think we're very close to a social tipping point where people in every walk of life are paying more attention to nature and I think it hasn't translated yet into political courage and political will.

I think it’s a temporary phenomenon to see that governments are lagging behind that social tipping point, but it's not unusual to see that. I think we just have to keep on pushing until that tipping point translates into shifting of subsidies and into even more investments. Private funding for nature has gone up elevenfold just in the last four years to almost $110 billion. And in that context, the negotiations centered around a one or two billion dollar public fund commitment. I mean, it almost sounds irrelevant, but of course it is important to have that kind of political signal to then unlock the much larger private finance. So let's just keep on pushing. But it's an exponential solutions curve that we're on now.

Mark Lee

Laura, what did you pick up from Colombia?

Laura Plant

I was delighted to see that one of the critical agenda items that did emerge was around invasive alien species, including some guidelines that that were published to support country governments to manage invasive species, and delighted that environmental DNA was even name checked as a nature technology to support with that. Because of the forensic element of it, it can pick up tiny amounts of an invasive species and therefore action can be taken before the population exponentially grows and takes over the area. To the point around nature technologies, there was that swell of nature technology present. Folks like Planet, ourselves, but many, many others. And that's great to see that people are stepping up to bring solutions to these challenges.

How to combine global and local nature data for business decision making

Mark Lee

We're going to move from Cali into the nature tech revolution, the report, the tools to move from doing no harm to nature positive. As we make the pivot, Matt, can you tell more about the NatureTech Alliance?

Matt Haddon

The Alliance was really an idea that came together around the Bloom Conference a year and a bit ago in California. The four of us met at Salesforce Tower in San Francisco and the thinking was pretty simple. It was that we could all see the scale of the challenge. We'd started to get our heads around the planetary boundaries, questions that people are talking about and how we're reaching a dangerous tipping point on the biosphere and its ability to support us and provide us with ecosystem services. We could see the big-ticket numbers that people are talking about with $44 trillion of global GDP, or nearly half of GDP, being dependent on nature, could start to see clients move. We also had experience of the carbon space where you saw a sudden maturation of digital solutions to help companies deal with the decarbonization journey. And so, we came together because we all saw that rapidly emerging in the nature space. So that's where the NatureTech Alliance was born. We launched it at Davos.

The purpose of the white paper was to try and shine a light on where are companies now, where are the leaders going and where is the technology going? We're going to go from data desert to a data deluge. By which it means there's going to be more data about the natural world then you can shake a stick at. The satellites, the eDNA will have so much data and insight about the natural world in the space of the next year or two, because of the sorts of technologies that are represented here, plus a bunch more. Plus, we're going to have the compute power to do something with it. All the emerging AI capability and the cost of both are going to go down.

Mark Lee

Amy, the state of nature-related data was a big focus of the report and the disparities between global and local data. What is the challenge here? How do we change the dynamics of this system to make the data more accessible?

Amy Rosenthal

The first and most important thing that we all recognize is that nature is different from climate. In climate we have this CO2 equivalent that is the same anywhere on earth because the atmosphere is well mixed. What makes nature so remarkable is how unique it is in every place on our planet.

When we're thinking about the species, the ecosystems and the life support systems that we depend on and care about, global data can often be coarse and out of date. Local only data on the other hand, can miss regional patterns and shifts that result in real nature risks and impacts for companies. So what we need are measures that provide meaningful results at every scale from project to jurisdiction or supply chain to operations to nation to globe. We need to understand how we're doing overall, as we make decisions in particular places. That's why a combination of something like remote sensing, that is the same and standardized everywhere on the planet, is better when combined with the most up-to-date localized data about what's happening on the ground, such as environmental DNA.

Mark Lee

So the nature data is myriad in its own nature. It's complex. We need it at different levels, in different forms. And then we need to be able to manage and use all of that. Laura, how do we take that next step? And can you maybe give us an example of how this starts to get applied?

Laura Plant

There are some parts of nature that can be really well monitored from a global perspective using remote sensing that does get you that global coverage. You get the habitat view, you get the view of the trees and some undergrowth now with that hyperspectral stuff that Planet's got. But also, there's a lot of stuff that make up those building blocks, that big whole ecosystem picture, that just cannot be measured using global averages, using model data sets, it needs to be measured on the ground. Those things are the animals that don't want to be seen, either from a satellite or by people on the ground. And it's also the fungi, the bacteria, the small things that are too small to be to be seen easily with the human eye.

And for us as a site-based technology, it’s super important that people understand that they can use those global databases, whether they be satellite data or whether they be sort of modelled extrapolated data from a desk-based literature review. In the early stages of their nature journey, their maturity, they can use it to understand where their risks and opportunities might be, what their material impacts and dependencies might be. Once they've worked that that out, they need to get on the ground and actually understand what's there. And how their company is having an impact and what action they could take and that is so local, it also relies on local knowledge as well. So speaking to people on the ground, once you've got that data about what they need to see and what they would recommend.

Strategies to overcome data fragmentation

Mark Lee

Tim, what we're hearing from Amy is that there is this unbelievably complicated picture of data at every level. Laura has just broken that down into some of its component parts. You're sitting inside a company that's trying to overcome the data fragmentation and get it clear enough to be able to make it decision worthy. You talked about your nature-based solutions, investments and otherwise. What steps are you taking with technology and with people's brains and experience to overcome that fragmentation and make this practical?

Tim Christophersen

So there's two kinds of data fragmentation. Inside each company where data can be siloed or not even in the system of records or some in PDF files, some in handwritten notes. Then there's the data fragmentation outside of the company in terms of what would be the equivalent to scope 3 in the climate discussions, data that is just not accessible for companies to use or they don't know where to find it. So for the internal data management challenge that is much easier to solve because when Salesforce acquired a company a few years ago called MuleSoft, that does exactly that. You can pull all your data into one source for AI, for example, to be accessible.

The outside data fragmentation challenge is a bit trickier because a lot of the data is proprietary and we will have to rely on collaboration to ensure we have access to the data at an affordable cost that companies need. And I think we need to have alliances like the Nature Tech alliance, but also there's many other efforts at making nature data available to companies. Not only at an affordable cost, but also in an easy to manage way. Of course, with the nature tech revolution, we are also in the AI revolution, and for us this becomes more and more about AI.

We're in the 3rd wave of that revolution now after predictive to generative AI, we are now at autonomous agents. At Salesforce we think that in a year from now, they will be as important and ubiquitous as websites and apps are today. Autonomous agents will become part of our lives. They make a lot of things that we do now much easier and much faster. They will allow us to work with amounts of data, but also with complexity of processes that right now are very difficult to manage. That is exactly what we need to solve the nature challenge.

Mark Lee

Matt, we're seeing lots of companies connect climate-related risk to enterprise risk. I think not that many yet figuring that out for nature or maybe for slices of it, but not holistically. Where are we in that journey in terms of understanding and when does it catch up to the application we see with climate?

Matt Haddon

I'll make a deliberate point to begin with, Mark. I think a lot of companies are pretty advanced and mature on carbon-related risk. So I think a lot of companies are thinking about decarbonization in shapes and forms. You hear sometimes people say talk about carbon tunnel vision because it's a very actionable, financeable, engineerable activity. The wider question of what's your enterprise exposed to in terms of climate change is a different question. So I think we're seeing organizations really starting to get their head around, how is my business impacted by a changing climate. And I think that's drawing in some of the nature conversation, if you've got a supply chain that's heavily dependent on sources of forestry, forest products, food, access to water. As companies get into those issues that we as sustainability people take for granted as being part of climate change, they're starting to realize that actually that's where their business risk is. And so I think what we're seeing is organizations starting to really think through the implications of climate change and therefore thinking through how their businesses are dependent on the natural world.

And it's being helped by some emergent regulations. Things like the EU deforestation regulations, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which on the face of it sounds like a disclosure requirement, are actually forcing companies to think through those risks.

Navigating the shift towards outcome-based metrics

Mark Lee

Matt, the report talks about the shift to net positive. I'd love you to explain maybe the drivers behind the shift.

Matt Haddon

What nature positive means in practical terms is, how does a company make the world better? Regenerative agriculture is a great example of the farming and food industry waking up to realize they can protect the sources, the places that our food and raw materials come from and can engage with the communities that work with us in those places. So, a shift from take as much as you can to put something back as you go.

Mark Lee

Tim, what does a net positive agenda or ambition bring to Salesforce?

Tim Christophersen

The CSRD affects 50,000 companies and many of them will have to report on nature, almost all of them will have to report on climate, water circularity. The bigger question longer down the line is, what will happen with all that data? Personally, I don't believe that this is just a massive data collection exercise. It is obviously meant to prepare for stronger regulation, which we need to get back to at least somewhere close to 1.5 degrees Celsius which we need to halt and reverse nature loss. So that is clearly on the horizon.

While many of these 50,000 companies in the past maybe didn't think about nature, a lot of them think about it now, but I wouldn't say all of them are going to think about nature positive. This for now is the realm of leadership and Salesforce, as many other companies like that, we like to see ourselves and our staff, investors, and customers like to see ourselves as a sustainability leader.

So what does leadership now mean when there's 50,000 companies that have to do a minimum, which was five years ago considered leadership. Of course, you have to then step up your game and say we want to go all the way. We want to go to a nature positive impact that we can measure, that we can document and there are courageous companies out there who are doing that at a large scale.

Matt mentioned regenerative agriculture, Unilever is investing a lot of their resources into measuring what that means, all the way down to soil biodiversity, which again, five years ago nobody talked about, but it's basically the source and origin of any everything we eat. And if we ignore soil biodiversity, we are in a downward spiral with no happy ending, so we have to reverse that and make that a virtuous cycle of reinvesting in nature. I think that is where corporate leadership can set the agenda for the next big steps after do no harm, which basically CSRD and other regulation are pushing all large companies into, so for us it's about leadership.

Mark Lee

So as we evolve leadership, metrics obviously plays into it too, that you want data and good ways to measure it. The report talks specifically about the need to pivot or to focus on outcome-based metrics. Laura, I wonder if I can ask you to define that for us. 

Laura Plant

The way we talked about outcome-based metrics in the report was as a counterpoint to practice-based metrics or some people would say input metrics. To use the Unilever regenerative agriculture to demonstrate that a bit, Unilever in the past might have said let's do a metric on the kilograms of fertilizer applied by our farmers and try and get that number down. Now that's a classic practice-based metric. We have a hypothesis, maybe that fertilizers are affecting soil health, but let's just measure the fertilizer use.

But actually, real leadership is about saying, let's go the extra step and let's measure the outcome. So, let's actually measure the health of the soil and some of the work we've been doing is to take soil samples, find out what the microbial and what the fungi, the bacteria, the little critters living in the soil are and be able to create a measure of soil health. So directly measuring the health of the soil in their farms.

Some people might have heard of this state-pressure-response framework, and in this example the pressures are what somebody's doing, so the fertilizer, the state is then the health of the soil and the response would be the management response. What do I do about it now that I have the information on how my pressures are changing the state.

The final point to make on this is that the benefit of these outcome-based metrics and thinking of pressures and states together is that these can then actually generate predictive models that you wouldn't have been able to do if you were just measuring the practice-based metrics. And we talked a little bit today about the power of artificial intelligence and that data analysis capacity that we now have. But with these outcome-based metrics you can calibrate models to say, we saw that this input or this practice did this to the outcome. Well, that was a bit different from what we thought. Let's change the model and then we can see what might happen in the future, if we then change things. That's such an advantage of these outcome-based metrics and why we as a group are trying to drive our clients and our stakeholders towards that and that's why it's so prevalent in the report.

Matt Haddon

That outcome-based example that Laura just shared is what a company can use to demonstrate categorically that it's contributing to nature positive. In the past, we've all lived through the greenwashing eras. Now we start to have a way for companies to say 'I'm working on this and this is the impact that I created, and we can measure it'.

Mark Lee

Amy, can you build on this conversation on the outcome-based metrics?

Amy Rosenthal

What Laura and Matt pointed to is that connection of cause and effect and that's what we're looking at. What we think of as attribution of practices to the outcomes that we care about and that often there's collective action to produce. So I want to give you an example. This is one we use in the paper. This is how outcome metrics really tell us the whole story, that practices alone doesn’t. Outcome metrics done right, let us know more about how nature is faring and how our actions contributed to those results.

The nonprofit Just Dig It, works with communities in East Africa to combat desertification and drying conditions under climate change. Just Dig It could just report on what they do together. Which is super low tech, drawing on ancestral techniques, they dig crescent shaped ditches in the ground that are known as buns. Practice metrics would tell us how many people took out shovels and how many buns were dug, but then we'd miss the outcomes which tell us the fuller story of the miracle that we can attribute to that practice.

The ditches capture a bit more of the morning dew and the sporadic rains when they come. That awakens the dormant native seabed in the soils. And overtime, native vegetation regrows, cooling the land and creating conditions for more widespread greening, in a place and with communities that really need it. I know this, because we can track those outcomes with satellites. You can see those changes as they occur and quantify the amount of land cooling, the amount of water retention and how much biomass increase there is, both at an individual site over time and across dozens of sites across sub-Saharan Africa. That I think is the real power of connecting practice to outcomes.

Mark Lee

Tim, the report does present a vision and a set of solutions that companies might be able to apply, can you just bring one of those to life for us? What advice is in there for companies about which solutions they can get their hands on and put to work?

Tim Christophersen

To build on Amy's point of small miracles, for example, we’re working with a customer in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the goal is to shift 6 million smallholder farmers to zero budget natural farming which enhances soil biodiversity and climate resilience. There, AI and the outreach of an agent can accelerate that process by orders of magnitude, because otherwise you'd have to go and talk to every one of these 6 million farmers and the extension agents simply can't do it. So, let's think about also the small miracles in the context of technology and how we can reach millions. There's a billion smallholder farmers in the world. How we can reach all of them in a way that is meaningful to them, that is accessible to them, that gives everybody a PhD in agriculture in their pockets and imagine what that could do for regenerative agriculture.

So I'm going to pick obviously the one that is closest to our heart is data fragmentation in terms of the seven recommendations. And again, the internal data fragmentation first of all takes a conversation between the Chief Sustainability Officer who used to be responsible for sustainability. And now the Chief Finance Officer suddenly comes into the picture because there's moves from voluntary to compliance action and there's now ESG controllers in most big companies. So suddenly you have to have a number of people around the table.

That is a huge opportunity because it's the first step to overcoming siloing of data within a company. And I think that's now what many companies are finding, that they unlock a lot of synergies by pooling all their data around sustainability and then comparing it with their enterprise resource planning, how can they gain efficiencies, how can they drive down emissions? How can they improve their water consumption, their water quality by comparing their sustainability data, which they used to hold in one place with their field services, with their procurement, with their supply chain. So overcoming the data fragmentation challenge is useful for many other things, but also for mitigating and addressing your nature, impacts and dependencies.

Using nature tech to improve corporate disclosure

Mark Lee

Amy, Laura, are there specific ways that you see nature-related technologies helping companies with the new compliance requirements that are emerging under regulation?

Laura Plant

I think nature technology has a huge role to play in this, but one of the key things we've seen is that there are lots and lots of either compliance or voluntary recommendations and requirements coming out. We call it the alphabet soup of recommendations, but actually fundamentally all of them have very similar underlying themes and similar pillars. Where nature technology can help is by using new cutting-edge technology to get robust data on what is happening at site for a company and throughout their supply chain in such a way that the data can be sliced and diced, to meet any of the regulations.

This is not just an exercise in data collection, so the onus is on the nature technology company to make this data actually useful throughout the year for decision making, for making better decisions for nature rather than just people seeing this as a compliance exercise and something to do once a year, but it doesn't actually change things on the ground. So, there's a very real need for convenient nature technology that also has that robust and scientific underpinning.

Amy Rosenthal

We know that putting together environmental DNA with satellite remote sensing is powerful, particularly for giving us up to date, localized and then universalized metrics for a unified data collection and reporting platform approach which we recommend in the white paper. The importance of being able to de-silo across pillars of sustainability and from sustainability alone into enterprise decisions and risk management - this is what Laura was talking about and Tim brought into where we see the future headed.

So as you pick up those different tools, bio acoustics, environmental DNA, camera traps potentially with edge technology, the ability to bring these things together across scale and across time, is going to give us windows into what's happening in a way that not only allows us to disclose and report on risks and impacts, but also to inform decisions in procurement, operations, supply chains in ways that can transform the way business is done. To be far more nature positive, making decisions that incorporate reduced risk and improved outcomes before we have the negative impacts and consequences we need to mitigate and overcome.

One of the new and emergent tools in our set is artificial intelligence. The kinds of deep learning techniques that we're using to derive from remote sensing and other information. The kinds of insights that allow us to know how nature and ecosystems are faring, its structure, its function and its composition, and how those outcomes are attributed to the behaviors and activities in business across the board. That's what we're really looking for and we think we can enable that by bringing together the kinds of insights that are tailored and come from ERM. The kind of universal standard data you can get from remote sensing at Planet, the localized and real time information about how species are changing, the intactness of an ecosystem and putting that together in a framework that allows you to assess risk, to track it across geographies and across business units in order to report out the way Salesforce software does. So that's why we've come together and that's where we think the future is headed and we really invite others to come along with us on this journey.

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