🌱 This week in NatureTech #16

🐘 Long Read (3-Min Read)

Traceability-Tech comes into focus as EU deforestation laws loom 🔎

What happened? Ghana and Cameroon announced separate pilot programs to help trace cocoa beans from farm to (mug?) as they prepare for a new EU regulation banning the import of commodities linked to deforestation.

What are the regulations?

• The EU’s new Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) are rules to guarantee that the products EU citizens consume do not contribute to deforestation worldwide.

• Companies trading in cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood will have to demonstrate evidence that their products are deforestation free from Dec 30th 2024. 

• Breaches will lead to fines of 4% of EU earnings and potentially criminal repercussions

The challenge?

• Cocoa is critical for these nations. About 60% of the cocoa grown in Cameroon and Ghana is exported to the EU and the industry employs about 17% of the working population. 

• Compliance could be costly for farmers who can’t afford to act. Nearly all cocoa producers are remote smallholders who, without support would struggle to comply with the law's requirements.

• Corporate and government support is critical to ensure farmers aren’t left behind. In both of these pilots, collaboration between local governments, major agricultural producers like Cargill, and startups (listed below) has been critical.

What are the pilots doing?

• 1. The platforms use satellite data to map the coordinates of each cocoa plantation and ensure they aren’t in areas associated with deforestation.

• 2.  Farmers are provided with ID’s and onboarded into databases with info on their production volumes techniques and yields

• 3. Individual products, like a bag of beans, are being tagged with barcodes and scanned as they pass through facilities identified in step 1

• 4. In theory this should provide transparency on the journey of individual beans from field to supermarket shelf

• The not-so-distant future: Imagine if you could scan the label of any product in the supermarket with your smartphone, see its impact, see who grew it and even leave a thank you message to the farmer!

For Nature?

• 90% of global deforestation is driven by the expansion of agricultural land, contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion and desertification.

• Cameroon and Ghana are havens for Biodiversity. Cameroon has over 500 species that are endemic, meaning they're found nowhere else.

For NatureTech?

The law will serve as a source of demand for supply chain transparency startups including: 

• 1. Dimitra (Canada) -  Helping smallholders in Latin America to certify coffee shipment compliance by combining blockchain with geospatial data

• 2. Koltiva (Indonesia) - Compliance platform that allows manufacturers to independently verify their supply chain data, ensuring completeness, quality, and compliance

• 3. Meridia (Netherlands) - platform ensures field data compliance with production laws and EUDR

 (Full story 1 here) (Full Story 2 here)

💬 Snippets for your lift conversations

• Big business: A group of 26 investors collectively managing $1.4trn of assets are asking large businesses to urgently assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on nature, to enhance risk preparedness.

• Big business:  The Global Biodiversity Framework’s 200 signatories have committed to mobilise $200bn per year for biodiversity. To support this ambition, the Biodiversity Finance Initiative and United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), have launched a programme to ensure finance is flowing to nature at scale.

• Big business: Microsoft announce the purchase of ~234,000 tons of carbon removal from Mexican start-up, Toroto. Credits are expected to have to strong biodiversity co-benefits.

• Finance: Manulife Investment Management, which claims to be the world's largest natural asset investor, has released its first annual nature report, revealing that it has met three of the five targets it had set for 2025.

• Finance: M&G Investments is rebranding its climate solutions fund as a nature and biodiversity fund, as it looks to capitalise on growing interest in the theme

• Finance: A UK local government pension fund has acquired a 25% stake in Rebalance Earth an asset manager specialising in curbing corporate exposure to nature-related risks

• Standards: SBTN expands target setting guidance to oceans

• Policy: An Argentine federal judge ordered a three-month suspension of deforestation in northern Chaco province, a rare step to protect one of the world's fastest degrading woodlands

• Policy: Pacific islands submit court proposal for recognition of ecocide as a crime

• Policy: The UK government is to slash the nature-friendly farming budget in England by £100m in order to help fill what ministers say is a £22bn Treasury shortfall,

• Research: Human-wildlife 'overlap' to increase across more than half of Earth's land by 2070

• Random: Scientists taught this once-extinct (in Europe) bird how to migrate by guiding them across Europe

• Research: Laughing frog and David Attenborough worm among 750 new species recognised in Australia

🎣 Deals

• BNP Paribas raises a new venture fund of €150m for ecological transition investments 

• Switch Bioworks, a San Carlos, CA-based biotechnology company developing low-cost and sustainable fertilisers, raised $17M in Seed funding.

• REDUCED, a Copenhagen-based, foodtech company that creates upcycled food ingredients, has announced the second closing of its Series A funding round (Total €8 million)

💭 Little Bytes

📊Stat: Brazil is the most biodiverse country on earth - it has a whopping 56215 plant species, 776 mammals and 1,864 birds

📺️Watch: The Biodiversity olympics kicks off

💬 Listen: Unveiling Mysteries of the Amazon Rainforest with Paul Rosolie

📆 Events

• 17 September - rewilding: beavers back in Britain. - London

• 26 Sept - NetworkNature Annual Event 2024 | Busting myths - Virtual

• 30 September - Nature for Life Hub 2024 - Virtual

• 8 October - The Global Nature Positive Summit 2024 - Sydney

• 9 October - frontiers in Nature-Finance: capital, compliance, and checks & balances. - London

• 16 October - greenwashing and greenhushing: navigating the corporate goldilocks zone - London

• 24 October - Bloom - Colombia

💼 Jobs

Special thanks to Theresa Lieb for this awesome list…

🐼 Corporate 🐼 

Tesco, Lead Nature Manager (Hertfordshire, UK) https://lnkd.in/etdq95Vc

Lego, Senior Manager, Global Sustainability Water and Nature (Billund, Denmark)https://lnkd.in/eNzNBStK

Danone, Sustainability Manager, Nature (Hoofddorp, Netherlands)https://lnkd.in/ex4DhJ-F

Danone, CDI — Nature Controller (Paris, France)https://lnkd.in/ekD_XqCK

ClimeCo, Project Manager, Nature Based Solutions (remote, US) https://lnkd.in/ei5mwwH9

IUCN, Programme Officer, Business and Nature (Cambridge, UK) https://lnkd.in/eauQUgTY

WWF, Knowledge Manager, Freshwater Practice (hybrid, Europe) https://lnkd.in/embs7iRY

🐝Finance🐝

BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group, Portfolio Manager (New York, US) https://lnkd.in/ejmizFMP

Conservation International, Americas & Amazonia Bioeconomy Investment Lead - CI Ventures (Brazil, Colombia or Peru) https://lnkd.in/eAYe3znB

🦊 Nature-based solution projects & nature tech startups 🦊

Treeconomy, Product Lead (hybrid, UK) https://lnkd.in/ekn39H4k

Conservation X Labs, Senior Director of Development (Washington, DC, US) https://lnkd.in/eC5Wc_Mc

Carbon Farm, Product Manager (Paris, France) https://lnkd.in/er-nKPJ4