We Need a Technology Revolution—For Nature

Data sharing has long been key to innovation. Consider navigation on your smartphone or car. It requires a lot of data to route you from home to office in the most efficient way—there’s the actual map, but also live traffic information, points of interest so you can grab your favorite coffee drink and calendar information on your next meeting so you won’t be late. The navigation tool is driven by data and applied in a way that is easy to consume by the driver.

We need to do the same with conservation data, so it can be used in innovative ways to help us save our planet. For instance, imagine that same navigation application sending you a message on where the most breathable air would be that day and rerouted traffic to lessen the impact of emissions. There’s a magnitude of possibilities to improve how we apply our data.

From data collection to application

Already, we are gathering droves of data: whether it’s via drones gathering wildfire data, bioacoustic sensors gathering biodiversity data in a forest, remote sensors gathering water quality data, or even our scientists out in the field manually capturing data. We need to be sharing that with our peers who are tackling these issues, with entrepreneurs who could be—and likewise, we must encourage them to do the same.

But, data itself doesn’t solve problems. With the advent of artificial intelligence, we can leverage data along a time continuum to begin to measure our impact and start to simulate the future on a real-time basis. We can train the machine to proactively communicate to us when areas are declining around the world. Or better yet, communicate that our solutions are improving a natural habitat or fishery. TNC scientists have created a variety of amazing algorithms that, for example, value carbon sequestration or global treasures such as our coral reefs. We need to put these algorithms to work across the world at scale leveraging existing and emerging technologies.

Better tech, better decisions

Finally, we will be partnering with others to help us package all the aforementioned insights into products that can be used by decision makers. Our Techstars Accelerator is a major part of our product strategy. But, by opening up our data and building out some artificial intelligence tools, we can also work with new and existing partners to take those insights and expose them to others. What if every urban planning tool was able to include nature in the decision making? What if all governments got a communication whenever an area in their purview was beginning to show decline, so they could take quick action before the decline caused major problems? What if every citizen in every country could tap into how climate change was playing a role in their everyday life?

TNC has a long history of developing solutions that can help us achieve a sustainable future, but as we invest more in technology, we have the chance to revolutionize the way we do conservation. And that’s what I take as my charge in this new role as CTO: to ignite a technological revolution that serves both people and nature.