Winners of the Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance Fintech For Biodiversity Challenge Announced
The winners of the Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance Fintech for Biodiversity Challenge were announced today, helping to shine a light on the practical way different organizations and initiatives are leveraging emerging technology to catalyze innovation for biodiversity finance which are encompassed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 14 and 15 that respectively address life below water and life on land.
The winners of the Challenge and a microgrant of USD each, are: Wildeye Credits a collective incentivization initiative working on alternative incentivization to eliminate poaching, currently being piloted by WWF Panda Labs in Romania; and the Global Mangrove Trust, a not for profit based in Singapore that empowers the protection, restoration, and reforestation of mangrove forests through a peer-to-peer blockchain platform for crowdfunding reforestation and conservation.
The announcement is particularly timely as the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid drew to a close on Sunday December 15 after an unprecedented long extension. While negotiators did not reach agreement on details of carbon market mechanisms under Article 6, progress on mitigation, adaptation and finance was made along with calls for augmenting the connection to other UN mechanisms including the Biodiversity COP 15 to be held in China in 2020.
“There is now wide recognition that we are facing not only a climate crisis but also a biodiversity crisis, and that these are inextricably linked,” remarked Katherine Foster CIO of the SDFA “Climate change is exacerbating the biodiversity crisis and yet ecosystems play a key role in mitigating and adapting to climate change.”
The two winning digital finance initiatives were recognized by the panel of judges, which was composed of members of the SDFA Advisory Board, for their innovative approaches towards financial innovation for biodiversity, including through emerging technology, along with their capacity to drive and scale solutions.
“It was not only the inclusion of fintech that was innovative” remarked Katherine Foster, ”but the focus on working directly with local communities and actors to shift incentivization and funding models.”
Wildeye Credits recognizes that local communities are not just critical allies but actors vulnerable to over-consumption of natural resources and therefore is working hand-in-hand with the at-risk groups to co-design incentives and alternatives solutions with those that are most impacted. Likewise Global Mangrove Trust focuses on innovating climate action as a peer-to-peer service through emerging technology while supporting local livelihoods, building green shields and moving companies to “climate positive actions.
The Fintech for Biodiversity Challenge was launched as part of the SDFA’s wider effort to increase the understanding of trends in the global fintech for biodiversity innovation landscape, to highlight role models, to better inform fintechs, financial service institutions, organizations and policy makers about emerging solutions and to help innovate finance for biodiversity leading up to the UN Biodiversity Conference to be held in October 2020 in China. The funding for the challenge and microgrant were provided under the auspices of the Mava Foundation (mava-foundation.org).
About the Winners:
The Global Mangrove Trust is a non-profit organization based in Singapore that is building out GROVE, a peer-to-peer blockchain platform for crowdfunding reforestation and conservation. Global Mangrove Trust seeks to empower the protection, restoration, and reforestation of mangrove forests for sustainable development, poverty reduction, the protection of biodiversity, and the sequestration of atmospheric carbon to combat climate change. https://www.globalmangrove.org/
Wildeye Credits (WWF Panda Labs) is a pilot initiative aimed at the restoration of natural processes specific to wilderness areas in Armenis, a commune in the southwestern Carpathian Mountains of Romania, by reintroducing European bison, a missing link in the ecosystem. The first iteration of the pilot will target poachers, with an incentive not to poach and a variety of monitoring techniques is under consideration to verify impacts, such as acoustic monitoring for gunshots and daily patrols formed of mixed teams conducting track-based surveillance through the cyber tracker evaluation method. Payments will be distributed to the community collectively using blockchain technology, and the city will be able to decide what to put the funds towards if the desired behavioral change is reached. This is the first iteration of the WWF Panda Labs experimental approach to incentivizes and empowers local communities to take environmental challenges into their own hands. It aims to refine the incentives paradigm by removing unnecessary intermediaries and focusing on connecting donors with doers. WWF Panda Labs is a global decentralized innovation lab that experiments with human-centered approaches to solve complex conservation problems. Similar pilots targeted at changing illegal logging and reducing shepherding in protected areas will follow in other regions. wwf.panda.org/our_work/projects/panda_labs
About the Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance (SDFA):
The Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance (SDFA) is a unique public private partnership co-founded by UN Environment and ANT Financial Services to leverage digital technologies & innovations to enhance financing for sustainable development. The SDFA catalyzes market innovation and policy action that leverages digital finance to, on the one hand, address the barriers to scaling sustainable finance, and on the other hand, promote innovation that unlocks sustainable investments in the real economy. The SDFA is a not-for-profit organization registered in Switzerland.
www.sustainabledigitalfinance.org
For more information, please contact:
Katherine Foster
Chief Intelligence Officer, SDFA
kf@sustainabledigitalfinance.org
Tel: +1 202 644 1141
@SDFAlliance