The business case for investing in biodiversity data

Fevziye Hasan , Jakob Nyström, Per Alström, Carina Andersson, Louise A. Ashton, David M. Baker, Michael J. W. Boyle, André P da Silva, Alice Högström, Alice C. Hughes, Emma Granqvist, Mats Eriksson, Robert Goodsell, Fabian Roger, Fredrik Ronquist, Tomas Roslin, Olga V Pettersson, Veronika A Johansson, Tobias Andermann

1.    There is urgent demand for biodiversity data driven by the need to assess impacts, dependencies, risks, and to implement nature-based solutions. In a data-driven economy, without access to robust data and the tools built from it, public and private sector actors cannot reliably evaluate their relationships with biodiversity or the outcomes of any sustainable nature-positive intervention.
2.    We identify three key barriers to effective biodiversity action: (1) the lack of biodiversity data; (2) limited biodiversity data literacy and the domain expertise required to apply data products in decision-making; and (3) the limited financing facilitation to channel capital, particularly from the private sector, toward reliable, high-impact open biodiversity data.
3.    Building on this, we present a streamlined end-to-end framework of the key stages from biodiversity data to nature-positive action, mapping biodiversity data to data products and business use cases, establishing biodiversity data as a critical investment. 
4.    First, we explain the origins of primary biodiversity data and the interdependence of specimen-based primary biodiversity data with data generated from new technologies including environmental DNA, computer vision and acoustic monitoring. These, collectively feed open biodiversity infrastructures like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
5.    Then, we discuss biodiversity data products, focusing on the ability to interpret and effectively apply biodiversity models, metrics, and tools in relevant contexts. We address the challenges posed by the complexity of biodiversity, the importance of its definitions, and the use of aggregated metrics for biodiversity and ecosystem services in reporting, including the role of nature-tech. We show case studies from a finance-academia partnership, multinational industry, a tropical biodiversity hotspot and nature-tech to illustrate both progress, gaps and opportunities.
6.    Finally, we propose an innovative blended financing model to incentivize and reward direct investments in biodiversity data from multiple sources, with specific attention to business and private capital funds. We conclude that investing in biodiversity data is the urgent step in enabling nature-positive action and driving scalable, data-driven solutions to the biodiversity crisis.