Goldman Sachs joined the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab to help advance the application of artificial intelligence to biodiversity measurement — a crucial ingredient for scaling nature-based financial products and meeting the needs of assessing nature-related demands on corporates and financial institutions.

“Accurately measuring biodiversity is key to unlocking the finance needed for conservation of critical habitats around the world,” said Kara Succoso Mangone, Head of the Sustainable Finance Group at Goldman Sachs. “Goldman Sachs and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will be able to develop actionable applications, enhanced with artificial intelligence, for biodiversity-related finance. We know from our experience — from preserving Karukinka Natural Park to underwriting conservation linked bonds in recent years — that measurement is crucial.”

“It is easy to understand that nature is vital to our well-being, but it is more difficult to quantify exactly how it is doing,” said Christina Shim, Chief Sustainability Officer at IBM. “For this new project, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will apply the latest technology toward this question, with the goal of helping organizations measure, monitor, and invest in biodiversity.”

The World Economic Forum has identified biodiversity loss as one of the top three global risks over the next decade. Given the scale of this decline, as well as increased focus by regulators, advocates, and investors, corporations have increasingly expressed interest in developing strategies to measure and restore biodiversity, working toward “nature-positive” outcomes, to help mitigate the impact to our natural environment. Finance will be key to supporting this transition, with the Global Biodiversity Framework estimating that the biodiversity finance gap stands at $700 billion a year between now and 2030. Through this collaboration Goldman Sachs will seek to identify and advance applications that market participants can leverage in support of a range of activities from fundraising to reporting in the biodiversity markets.

To unlock the next generation of biodiversity monitoring strategies, project researchers will leverage advanced AI models to analyze and process multimodal geospatial data. The project will explore how to best integrate data streams from available satellites, drones, ground-based sensors and more into useful ecological measurements.

Source: Goldman Sachs