An introduction to the biodiversity in the digital age series

The metaverse, an immersive realm of digital assets and online utility, would appear to offer an unlikely pairing with biodiversity, a concept bound in the complex physicality of nature. However, I believe that we are heading towards a future where the two are deeply intertwined, driven by shifts in technology and human behaviour.

This is a short introduction to a series of articles that will explore the representation of biodiversity in an increasingly digital society and investigate systems to facilitate meaningful transfers of value between nature and the digital world. I believe that the key mechanism to enable this is a biodiversity credit market, a system where conservation projects generate tradable units representing positive outcomes for biodiversity.

While on-ground hands-on work is needed to protect and restore nature, the value of this work can be captured digitally in a biodiversity credit market. An array of digital tools and components are required for a digital biodiversity credit market (DBCM). This includes digital tools to assist with the generation of credits, digital data to represent and validate outcomes, and digital infrastructure to deliver credits and facilitate market function.

However, I also believe that the rapidly expanding digital economy will offer a new and important source of high integrity demand for biodiversity credits, an area to date that remains largely unexplored.

Over a series of five articles I will drill deeper into the topic of biodiversity credit markets, explore the role of the digital assets and the digital economy in empowering high integrity demand, outline a process for creating digital representations of biodiversity outcomes, identify a system linking these components into a network of community-owned nature-positive economies, and explore the pros and cons of a digital-first approach.

It is generally accepted that nature has intrinsic value independent of its utility or benefit to humans, with worth and a right to exist and flourish regardless of its instrumental value. Nature is also an integral part of our existence, with our evolutionary and cultural history intertwined with and shaped by the challenges and opportunities that nature presented. We rely upon nature for essential resources like clean air, water, food and materials for building and manufacturing, and time spent in nature can reduce our stress, improve our mood, enhance our cognitive function, and promote overall feelings of well-being.

Society is becoming increasingly aware that we must find new ways to protect and restore nature, by re-examining and modifying human behaviour to promote and facilitate change. With a long history of human behaviour on the record it could be argued that the near-term mode of operating for large portions of society is the norm. We champion economic growth, consumption and lifestyle whilst technology is increasingly integrated into our day to day lives.

Despite some progress towards sustainability, wholesale change is a difficult process and generally takes decades to be achieved. Yet we are now at a time where the urgency of the biodiversity crisis demands a swift and concerted response, with the decline of nature perhaps moving at a rapidity beyond our capacity to change.

I believe that it is time to consider unlikely alliances as we look to new solutions with the capability to conserve and restore biodiversity at scale.

This includes alliances with financial and cultural systems that can be repurposed from historically destructive modes of operation to deliver positive outcomes for nature. Positive change can be achieved by recognising the value of nature within economic systems, and via integrating biodiversity conservation with how people live through delivery of nature to where people are and will increasingly be in the future. It is therefore a primary objective to make nature conservation incidental using systems designed to bring biodiversity to the people.