Nature-based Solutions

Increasing transparency with NbS capital providers through a digital MRV tool

InvestConservation partnered with Orbify to enhance transparency with their capital providers using a digital MRV tool. They achieved this by monitoring the forests in real-time through the use of satellite imagery and other remote sensing data.

CUSTOMER

InvestConservation is a company dedicated to protecting the biodiversity in tropical hotspots from deforestation and endangered species extinction by making conservation investable. They use tradable blockchain tokens, efficient technology, and transparent data to ensure more money per dollar invested goes into conservation and supporting local communities. The focus is on the most threatened and globally significant hotspots in tropical forests that are home to the world's richest and most important ecosystems on just 2.5% of the earth's land surface.

PROBLEM

As a new age nature-based solutions (NbS) developer and operator who is already using blockchain technology for fund use traceability they wanted to take their transparency commitment even further by allowing the capital providers to see what’s happening with the forest that they are investing into in real time. That required use of satellite imagery and other remote sensing data and that is where the challenge came in: accessing the remote sensing data seemed quite out of reach due to a lack of technical expertise. Additionally, the traditional process of obtaining RS data would be both time-consuming and expensive, further complicating their efforts. They knew that overcoming this challenge would allow them to improve their NbS initiatives at all stages, not only the monitoring and reporting, but also for including planning and verification.

SOLUTION

To achieve their transparency goals, InvestConservation partnered with Orbify to activate a digital MRV tool for the project design and monitoring The platform aggregates multiple data sets, including optical, SAR (Synthetic-aperture radar), and LIDAR, to calculate crucial forest monitoring indicators such as vegetation health, stand canopy height, historical land use changes, together with above ground biomass (AGB) used for carbon stock assessment. All of this post-analysis data is ready to use within an intuitive dashboard based on the geo coordinates of InvestConversation’s projects.

RESULT

By levereging the power of Orbify, InvestConservation can now better evaluate new projects from their conservation partners and produce effective reports for the capital providers all through an intuitive web app. Now all of the crucial aspects of NbS implementation (such as project design documents, project funding, verification & monitoring) are fully supported by Orbify’s cloud environment.