Sheldon Anthony IO

Watching an elderly woman who has poor eyesight struggling to read her WhatsApp messages and often always seeking assistance to reply to messages sent to her. The answer lies not far away from her, watching unemployed youths chatting using its voice note feature. It opens up your eyes to how close biodiversity loss is to humans than they think and the role digital tools can play in biodiversity loss. In this blog post, we will explore how digital technology can either help us conserve biodiversity or contribute to its loss and what we can do to make it more sustainable and inclusive for everyone.

When we talk about biodiversity loss we are almost always pointing to nature and environments that are far away from us but it's closer to us than we think. When we find it hard to relate and things are not affecting us we often leave it to be until it starts to affect or impact us. These deteriorating ecosystems are right in front of our eyes and the opportunities to preserve and reverse loss with the aid of digital technologies are a present reality and not in the far-fetched future. Companies are exposed to resource scarcity, value chain disruptions, and an increase in operating costs when biodiversity is lost. We can't keep emphasizing that "nature" is important to our businesses and not understand what that nature is. That deteriorating ecosystem could be a television or radio broadcasting right now while a productive employee that needs immense concentration is trying to work. 

By leveraging soil ecosystems, RootLink is creating a self-organizing system that connects farmers with end users, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from food transportation and creating a sustainable local food hub. One-third of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the global food system. Food-related emissions are accounted for by 11% by transportation, with conventional food traveling an average distance of 1,518 miles. The average distance traveled by food sourced locally is 44.6 miles.Their question was: How can urban food ecosystems be promoted? By connecting urban farmers with end consumers, they aimed to promote local farming, a phenomenon similar to nature, which is responsive and attuned to the local environment.By reducing transportation, packaging, and storage GHG emissions, post-production GHG emissions can be reduced. They also improve urban resiliency by creating a sustainable local food ecosystem that also addresses several local problems associated with climate change.  In the current economic climate, urban farmers struggle to expand their market and connect with their customers. Having the ability to think of urban farms as reliable resources is inconvenient for customers who don't know what is available from local farms. In most cases, urban farming products are just cool options, but not the most convenient.The communication and business models of urban farmers still face significant obstacles due to farmers' markets, CSA models, pop-up vendors, and mobile markets. Grocery shopping at a store, for instance, is much easier than learning about local markets. Urban farmers are not only connected to their end consumers in a more effective way but also provided with an environment that facilitates such practices. As far as design context is concerned, urban ecosystems resemble soil ecosystems. Water and nutrients are conserved, nutrients are filtered, information is exchanged, and information is exchanged so that a fertile environment can be created. Urban ecosystems must also meet certain conditions for rich urban farming to flourish. The soil ecosystem provides them with biomimicry lessons that allow their study to unravel complexities within the urban ecosystem and to apply those lessons to our work as well.[1]

Business leaders must prepare themselves for new approaches and standards that could affect the scope and depth of their biodiversity analysis in their organization. We need to start paying careful attention to the over-abstraction of resources which harms our productive ecosystems. Even though 51 percent of companies acknowledge biodiversity loss in some way, only 5 percent have set quantified targets.^[2]  To innovate in things like urban environments, we have to start thinking right in our gardens. If we are not thinking about our gardens first how can we expect to impact things like forests and larger ecosystems? 

A company’s success depends on creating value without harming nature or its benefits. Regardless of whether their profitability relies directly or indirectly on biodiversity and ecosystems, all businesses are impacted by them. We have an opportunity as a business community to have a global impact and change our economic systems in a more sustainable, nature-conscious manner but we need to understand nature better. Digital will play a pivotal role in facilitating data collection, analysis, and distribution. By embracing digital technologies, scientists, conservationists, and policymakers can better monitor biodiversity, develop effective strategies for conservation and restoration, and inform the public of beneficial actions they can take in their own backyards. Digital technologies can also be used to create powerful visual representations of data that are easily understood and acted upon. This will equip researchers and decision-makers with the tools they need to safeguard our planet’s biodiversity more effectively.