“Who does believe we can fix the climate problem?”
This was the question posed by Marco Rodzynek as he took the stage at We Don’t Have Time’s STHLM +50 Climate Hub earlier this year.
Marco is CEO of NOAH Advisors. We’re the leading European corporate finance boutique specializing in the Internet sector and the creator of the NOAH Conference sustainability conference held annually.
“Do you have a solution?” asked Marco. “Or is it just a naïve belief that everything will fall to the right place?”
“I believe that the problem we are in will never, ever get solved if we don’t collect data – and I’m talking systematically, hectare by hectare,” he said.
“How many forest hectares are there? Four billion. Now the United Nations…they developed a program called the REDD-plus. How many hectares do you believe are saved through the REDD-plus project? Less than 0.1 percent of the 4 billion hectares.”
Marco wants to know: “If we have a tool to save forests which is not being used, what type of humanity have we become if we don’t even acknowledge anymore that we fail?”
“That is what I want to interrupt,” he said.
And this is where the NOAH Data Alliance comes in.
The NOAH Data Alliance is a group of companies and individuals whose one common connection is a press to save the climate – and biodiversity.
”Just sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere, we maybe extend our life,” said Marco, “but it will certainly not fix the injustice done to biodiversity and indigenous people.”
Biodiversity protection must increase, and this is only one step in the long journey ahead. “Once you have an area secured,” said Marco, “what are the options you can implement – what projects to make revenue? Because cutting trees, and looking for gold and oil, these are very profitable activities in today’s world. So how can we change countries to look into non-resource-taking activities – CO2-reducing activities? We need to do a systematic land use analysis. Without that, we have no chance to ever be sustainable.”
There is plenty of data already available – through satellites, as one key factor.
“But nobody uses the data,” Marco points out. “In fact, there are over 125 environmental KPI services, and if you add up all the users…we’re talking about a few thousand.”
“When we started our collaboration, and we checked how many people care about the environment, we looked at the U.S. market,” said Marco. “And only 30 million monthly visits happen to conservation [websites], while crypto gets a trillion, while Amazon gets two and a half trillion. So is the environment a luxury project – a hobby – that we as the well-off ones on the right side of the planet cannot engage in?”
The NOAH Data Alliance believes this doesn’t have to be the case. We believe we can solve the question of sustainability – of nature conservation, of indigenous peoples' protection – but it won’t work if we all wait for an intrepid NGO or two to do the work.
We need a top-down approach to creating projects that solve the problems. Then, once the projects are defined, financing must be found. And often, that is a disastrous process.
The NOAH Data Alliance offers a different way forward.
“This system would provide upfront cash to long-term carbon credits offtake agreements,” explained Marco, “because we would be able to eliminate the political risk. Why? We have our monitoring tools in place. It takes a long time to take many trees, and they cannot take the trees as fast as we can observe it.”
There is a lot more to be said about the NOAH Data Alliance, and a lot more that has been happening. Watch Marco’s full STHLM +50 presentation in the video below. And let us know: what are your questions about the NOAH Data Alliance?
https://youtu.be/1QeKV76wzAo?t=9248
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We just launched the Nature Data Alliance
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Exactly
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True! Data collection and analysis is very key in solving climate problems.
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@gorffly_mokua that's why we have sentinel and other infos. The more data collected globally and analysed then the better our predictive abilities, of course, depending on the algorithms and models, and, of course, the human beings involved. All these can be faulted and flawed, by the way. Agree. Biodiversity protection must increase.
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💚💚