Joseph Millard 

Humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more an ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be to take inspiration from recent developments in global carbon market theory and spatial finance, and devise a new central bank digital currency (CBDC) for nature, paid to individuals for reductions in anthropogenic pressure. We could then track a conjunction of anthropogenic pressures from space or remotely, combine that with a model predicting biodiversity change, and then link that to our new global currency that would self-regulate those pressures towards bending the curve. In biodiversity modelling alone there is a lot we would need to learn to make this work, but I think one federated currency for nature might be the economic mechanism we need to fully integrate the pathway of detection, attribution, and action into one global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS), and finally slow biodiversity change.