The Think Wildlife Podcast
Season 3, Episode 1: The State of Nature Tech with Gilad Goren
Welcome to the third season of the think while at podcast. I would like to thank all the supporters who have been passionately listening to the podcast since season one which started in January 2023. Today, in episode one of season three, I speak to Jalad Koren, who is the executive director of the Nature Tech Collective. This is a non-profit number alliance, accelerator and intelligence unit that is advancing the uptake of major-based solutions to integrate nature protection into all sectors of society. The alliance is supporting various nature tech startups around the world to upscale the impact. In this episode, we talk about some of these initiatives and also the state of the Nature Tech industry and how technology can lead to way to support conservation and definite climate crisis. Tune into this episode and do let me know what you think. But before we start this episode, I would like to make a small announcement. Coming from this season, I will be providing listeners with the option to upgrade to a pay and subscription. Do not worry, this is completely optional and the podcast will not be behind paywall. But this subscription will allow me to expand the podcast and hopefully even start a video podcast. Artitionally, I will be donating 30% of the revenue from these subscriptions to various wildlife engineers which include the engineers which appear on the podcast or other engineers which listeners have suggested. For this episode, I will be looking for the leading wildlife engineers working on incorporating tech internet solutions. So if you have any suggestions, do let me know. If you are willing to support the podcast financially, you can do so on Substack or YouTube. Welcome to the podcast, Killad, it's a pleasure to have you on today. Sure, yeah, pleasure is online, happy to spread the message of Nature Tech to the world. So what got you interested in Nature Tech? So my background is really in the nexus of tech impact and entrepreneurship, sort of been where I've been playing for the last 15 years. And most recently, called my past life before running a nonprofit, is as a co-founder of an impact blockchain company by the name of Big Green. And we started with a vision of democratizing impact investing writ large and very quickly it came to the realization that, well, the SEC is not a big fan of using blockchain as a means for doing this, at least not yet. So the regulations were just incredible hurdles. And at the same time, there was an interesting interchange between tokenization and what we saw in the world of carbon, and so we started exploring that, realizing that this space a little less regulated, in a good way, and there's a lot of opportunities. So I began exploring that space, we started building marketplace infrastructure, and as a result, I had a crash course MBA on the space of major credits starting with the marketplace and moving up towards what project finance is, what MRV is, what the frontline communities are bracing with, even at one point I was helping put together a massive red plus project in Peru that was indigenous led, and basically I learned so many of the challenges that the space faces. And that opened me up to moving beyond carbon, to biodiversity credits, to nature credits, and then to the world of nature tech in the role of place. During, when it got a little tough as startups, as it happens for often for startups, funding got low and I basically fired myself so that the company could survive, and I'm glad to say that it's surviving and driving. At that point, I already made contact with the MRV collective, and the MRV collective, only members reached out when they saw kind of my update on LinkedIn, and they asked me to join and take over as the first executive director for what at the time was an organically built organ community, if you will. I said yes because number one, nature tech is a small and emergent category that I got really excited about because I saw how many of the pitfalls are created by a lack of data certainty. It's what's been keeping back, frankly, us from closing the nature finance gap at large. And then separately, it was a space that needed a nonprofit, and I am not one to always jump into the world of nonprofits. I think nonprofits have a role to play, often it's limited to be honest, but when you talk about an emergent space where private sector funds can really flow freely in a for-profit setting, because it's too early to pick your winners if you're investing for a VC. And there isn't enough traction for a corporate to get involved yet, not apart from pioneers. You need a nonprofit to come in and build a capacity for that sector, so that's what got me excited about the nature about MRV collective, which is now the nature of collective. Really, you guys published a report about the nature of fintech sector map. Talk about this. What exactly is the nature of fintech and what role does it have in tackling the biodiversity and climate stresses? Yeah, so the nature fintech sector map has been out for a bit, and we're actually recording this, what, on the 14th of October, and next week COP16 will happen, which is the biggest gathering of stakeholders around the world of biodiversity, and that will happen in colleague. We'll be there. We'll actually be debuting the first ever nature tech taxonomy and the 2024 nature tech report. The nature fintech map, we thought, is very important to focus on, because whereas the world of nature tech, nature tech is essentially not necessarily a new spate of technologies. See the technologies in nature tech are technology that you would find in the world of climate tech, at tech, the defense industry, so satellites, AI, IoT, all the buzzwords, really, blockchain. Where nature tech differentiates is that its focus is on transitioning the world economy towards a nature positive state, and that's the difference. We're not trying to maximize productivity for the sake of productivity. We're trying to shift the entire understanding of how capitalism, how the economy works with nature, to reach effective coexistence with nature. Whereas conservation, regenerative ad, industrial change, those are top-down clusters, and that will be reflected in the nature tech taxonomy. Finance presents the horizontal view. It's the pipes. It's the lubricant. It is the incentive that can generate a move towards planetary health. If nature finance is the cause, the why, it's the incentive to drive funds towards closing the nature finance gap. We're putting money in the form of nature-linked bonds, for example, or incentivizing investment to a certain space. A lot of really amazing innovative financial instruments are coming up. FinTech is the how. How are we actually going to move money from, you know, Zurich, or San Francisco, to the sheep people people by Iquitos, or to the front line communities in the Congo basin? So nature FinTech is the important piping that makes it all happen, and no one's really covered it. And so what we try to do with the report is show, oh, there is an active ecosystem. And oh, you no longer have excuses, because nature FinTech is your tool for getting money to the front lines in a sort of the least amount of intermediaries, the least amount of money lost along the way. And its perfect partner is all the technologies that are bringing in the transparency and the connection, which is sending data back towards San Francisco, towards Zurich, to make sure that their money is being spent in the way they intend. And that's where nature tech really did play an incredible role. So now let's, for continuing with nature, FinTech, let's talk about its role with the private sector. So how is tech helping with disclosures related to nature, related risk exposures, and helping corporate with environmental compliance frameworks? Well, I think the first thing you need to do is kind of step back from the disclosure frameworks that are a super, super important innovation in this space, because it's disclosure frameworks, TNFD, CSRD, the tools that are GRI provides, all the alphabet soup. They provide a map, if you will. They tell you how to basically, well, they don't tell you how to collect the data. They tell you what they need to be collected and what you need to prove in order to be on the right side. Where nature tech plays a role is in providing a feasible suite of tools for the actual nature data collection, for the sense making, and for the sharing. When TNFD and all these other frameworks came up, and this is all recent, by the way, as you well know, the nature disclosure frameworks, the private sector was sort of in shock. If we thought TCFD, if we thought disclosing on carbon is hard, one can only imagine how difficult it is to disclose on nature, right? And there's that adage around carbon, a ton is a ton is a ton, well, what's a ton of biodiversity, right? What's a ton of soil erosion? It's so nuanced, so biome-specific, it's so cause-specific, the interventions. Oh, yeah, by the way, we don't actually know what the state of nature is in the first place. And that is really, that is the underlying call the original set of this all. Because we don't have an accurate assessment of where we are in terms of nature's health right now, because there hasn't been a framework to collect data written for everyone, right? You don't have, you know, if you want to check the weather right now, in Timmuktu, you take your phone, you go to the weather app and you'll get a pretty accurate assessment. Why is because we have these labs that are collecting meteorological data, it's done constantly, it's getting better and better, and voila, we have an answer. We don't have that for nature. Nature Tech provides the tools for doing so. So now we go back to your question around disclosure frameworks. Are we just going to send a whole bunch of, you know, ecologists to start measuring trees? And what are we going to do about the entire supply chain, right? It's just been so, it's been so convoluted, so that McDonald's on purpose doesn't know where its beef is coming from. So maybe there is some ability to say, hey, I don't know where it's coming from, I don't know if it's better good. A nature tech can actually unravel this Gordian know and actually do something about it. And it's, we're at this all hands on deck moment, especially at COP16, TNFD and the other frameworks, the private sector's coming in, the NGO sector, we're all coming in to actually solve for this. And that's a role, that's part of our mission and nature tech elective is to be the sort of convening and directing body. To solve for the big challenges that would be enable us to close this nature data gap, which will make it easier both for disclosure. But the other part of it is the investment part, which is no less important. In the recent times, nature tech has been mostly used for monitoring, biodiversity and carbon offsets and those, it's basically been fairly limited to monitoring of a conservation. But what are some of the uses of nature tech in actual practical conservation and restoration? You bring a good point a lot of the space traditionally, and by traditionally, I mean a lot of years, has been sought more of like conservation tech, but that's another sort of term that's bandied about, which is very important. But as the name suggests, it focuses on conservation, the way we define nature tech. I mentioned what the mission of nature tech wide exists, it's a result of the trend. What it covers in terms of transitions is definitely conservation restoration of the different biomes, right? So, from fortitude to anti-disertification, towards revitalization of oceans, of freshwater. And the way I see it, and you know, it's a bit some work, but it helps me. I see conservation is like no man's land, right? That's the areas where we want nature to reside and thrive in this little human touch as possible. Then there is regenerative ag, which is a huge, huge bucket, and that is the transition from industrial agriculture towards the more nature friendly, nature positive, agricultural landscape. And that's sort of in the middle, right? So, we want the crops, we want the animals to grow, but for our purposes. And then the third piece is the realm of humans, the built environment, transportation, supply lines, and we put in, we bucket in finance there. In all three of those transition buckets, nature tech plays a crucial role. That taxonomy will, you know, the point is to actually drill down to the specific challenges and the solution. So, you'll have that available in a week. So, yes, we go far beyond conservation in terms of where nature tech can play a role. And then in terms of what we do, we basically have a shorthand, we call the five M's. So, nature tech is active in the role of market pressures. So, collecting information and sharing it to induce pressure on companies to do something, and that's related obviously to the disclosure frameworks, the measurement, the MRV, monitoring reporting verification. So, that's a, you know, use of things like DNA, EDNA rather or ERNA, biocoustics, satellite imagery, and everything else in between in order to collect information to see what's there, the modeling, which is no less important, that's your sense making. So, a sort of like NALA or NatCap research or DUNIO or others would take that information and actually make it human readable so that then companies can report in a much easier way. Monitoring is the fourth M, making, moving, you know, we like our M's, the idea is that we have technology to actually deploy interventions. So, drone-based seating or wildfire prevention, algae-based fertilizers, it's a whole slew of solutions that are actually intervening and making, in getting us towards a healthier monetary economy, and then the last bit is monetization. And how do you actually incentivize it with money, right? So, that's things like nature credits, NACS, which are essentially natural asset companies, listing companies on, you know, stock exchange, where the companies represent essentially the river. Really interesting innovations in that space. And those are the five categories of nature tech in terms of the technology and the solutions. So, one drawback of nature tech and specifically AI is the high electricity that demands, and many critiques of using technology for conservation and nature, nature restoration is that AI uses too much carbon, I mean, it emits too much carbon through electricity and, like, I'll deflate, sorry, I lost my thought, so, there's been a lot of criticism about using nature tech and AI for conservation and nature restoration because of its high electricity demands, which, obviously, increases its carbon output. So, what is your opinion in this regard? Well, I've never read this criticism before, as it relates to nature tech. I guess you're talking AI, AI in blockchain, maybe, though blockchain is mostly no longer an issue outside for Bitcoin, and no one really is using Bitcoin for nature tech, so, we don't have to claim blockchain as a problem. The AI piece is, I mean, this is part of a wider conversation that needs to happen. There's two things to consider. One is, unfortunately, more in a state where we cannot rely on government regulation alone to do the job. In an ideal world, government regulates, there is a carbon tax, there is a biodiversity-related tax, that's not going to happen globally. There's certain areas where there is regulatory-based compulsion, which is great. For example, a biodiversity net game is the law of the land of the UK, so companies from the real estate space or anyone who has a physical footprint must support biodiversity-related actions, which basically makes up for any potential hazard plus 10%. It effectively created a compliance biodiversity credit smart replace, which is amazing. Is that going to happen in the States? I'm not going to build on it anytime soon. So if regulation is not something we can rely on slowly and behavioral change, let's be real. I love humans. They're not the easiest to convince very large, so I don't want to rely on that slowly. The tech, we're going to tech our way out of it, we're going to innovate our way out of it. I'm not putting on all my eggs in that one basket, but we have to because it's our strongest card right now. An AI is a paradigm shifter. Everything people say about AI, it's true. It's the scariest thing, and it's the thing that's going to save us and everything in between. But it's already proven. If you look at something like Google alpha fold, the amount they're just creating new IP and new IP related to medicine, life-saving medicine, AI is proven in that it is basically enabling this whole world of us being able to speak with animals. It's literally something that's starting to happen, but even before we speak with animals, the ability to identify, there's a great startup nonprofit called Rainforest Connection. They put microphones in the jungle, and they basically record whatever sounds they hear, and they use AI, they use machine learning and AI in order to decipher how many species of birds are there, which ones, how much they have, but then also, is that a chainsaw? Are those poachers? They're able to get all that, and then another that can happen with that AI. We're talking about the most high value volumes. There's no chance you'll understand what they are unless we have tech-powered MRV and modeling technologies, because, A, we can't have humans go there, and B, we don't want them to. I would say the potential benefits of AI outweigh the detriments, especially because we're increasingly getting better in reducing our footprint and in finding ways to offset. At this point, carbon is basically just that water situation, right? We just need budget in order to take us to net zero. It's just a matter of time and incentives. We don't have that for biodiversity. We could reduce carbon and bring it back to before. Once a species goes extinct, unless we want to start investing a lot of money in bringing back species, and there's people that are doing it with a mammoth, okay, so it might go to the charismatic species, right? We may bring back the giant sloth, but who wants to bring back slug number 3,500? This is truly the race against time, and I don't think we have time to think about the carbon implications of AI, if AI is really our way to a new paradigm of conservation. I'll set it there. I do agree. I also do feel like the benefits outweigh the carbon argument, especially because a lot of the activities have a far greater carbon impact than a long-term, like deforestation has a far greater impact than a long run than using AI, I guess. So, talk about the NTC sector intelligence unit. Yeah, so, as I said, MRV collective was the first iteration. We converted it, we basically rebranded as the Nature Tech Collective December of last year, and part of the move is to, number one, encapsulate all of nature type, obviously. And number two is because where we started as sort of the call to supply side, Nature Tech solution providers, coming in as executive director, one of the sort of the learnings I wanted to bring from my past work is that you can just build inside of it. So, one of the problems about Web3, one of the things that held it back in terms of adoption is that, traditionally, I mean, mostly it was a lot of developers building and getting really excited about products, and that's one of the biggest challenges is when your product led, you don't actually think about what the buyers want. You build things that are just not going to work for, the buyer, and in order to preclude that challenge, we very quickly decided to open up our work as much as possible towards the buy side. So, that's the corporate, the private sector, the financial institutions, the big NGOs, the governments, the project developers. So, over the past year, we've been bringing more and more of those cohorts into the mix, and part of the way to get them in, and frankly, it also adds a ton of value to our startups, our nature tech solutions, is in creating materials that do a lot of the education and sense-making for nature tech. There's still an awareness, a curve that we need to flatten. People here in nature tech, they kind of think they know what it is, but they don't really. I mean, the taxonomy we're putting on next week will be the first true nature tech taxonomy ever. And so, the sector intelligence unit is putting out these reports, these sector maps. We're also running webinars. We're going to be doing a lot of publishing, and we now have an amazing new content marketing manager who's going to be just driving a ton of informational content. And the goal is, number one, as a public good, to make it easier for a company to go from, "Oh no, I just signed up for some disclosure commitment to, "Oh, I got this," because I know that for this supply chain, I use this, but that, I use that. Our job is to shorten the gap, shorten that path between, "I have to do something too. I know what I'm doing right now." And that's the point of the sector intelligence, and it's matched with this other part, which we kind of call it corporate accelerator, and that's when a company, and we have a few of them right now, that was challenged, and they're looking for support in solving for the challenge. We basically build them a curriculum that goes from solidifying and crystallizing the challenge, really understanding what it is, what's the available sort of information about it, educational content, and then drive towards a process of matchmaking. I mean, we obviously prioritize our members, but anyone who's a fit we bring in, and then we help them decide, help the client decide what the shortlist is, and then we would run live demo days in person or virtual, and we get them towards, you know, this is a process that without support can take years, and I know this experience, having done enterprise sales in my past life, we bring this down to like three to four months, which could be a game changer for many on both sides, honestly, both the corporates and the startups. So for those people who are looking to get into nature tech and start their own initiatives, what would your advice be? Where would be a good point to start and to learn about the industry as a whole, and get the hands dirty? I mean, this is a shameless up plot, but it is a good reason. I think it's the best way to do it, and that's to join us. If you already have a startup, or you're in the space, and you're looking for support, community, and all the rest, obviously, our doors are open. If you are not yet in space looking to learn more, reach out to us, we're happy to put you in the right direction. There's a lot of material that's coming out, a lot of hours, but there's a lot of other stuff. You could get involved in existing startups or our solutions and support them, maybe get a gig that way, get inspired, there's a lot of corporates that get into the space. Broadly speaking, nature is massive industry and it's just going to keep growing. The way climate tech was growing. It's nothing compared to what nature is going to be, because nature is so much bigger. Climate is actually part of the planetary boundary. It's one of the facets of the nature challenge. Literally, every company is going to have a nature strategy. Think of that. Literally, every company, because we're all impacted by it. Just to look at Hurricane Colleen and Hurricane Milton, they just happen to states. A friend of mine is in Asheville, and she's just telling me how the damage and destruction and pain has been underreported. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who may be gone. It's because, frankly, no one ever expected a hurricane to hit mountains and causes kind of damage, and that's going to be the new normal. Literally, every facet of our economy is going to be under pressure, and so from a job opportunity, they're boundless. First step, get involved with the community, either our community, which we invite you to, or any other communities in the space. There's more of them popping, and in terms of setting yourself up for success, I mean, yes, you can take a more traditional route, go to the path of science, go to the path of applied science, so colleges, biologists, and then do the work in the field. If that's not your calling, that's cool, too. I didn't go this way. I studied history. There's the entrepreneurial path, which is working with the experts in finding areas where their science has not been applied yet, not been commercialized yet, not been productized yet. Obviously, if you're into communications and marketing, God knows scientists need a lot of help there. Literally, everything you do, every skills that you have is relevant to the Nature Tax Space School that's so big, and it will be bigger, so, yeah, just get started. That's all about the tech skills specifically. What do you think will be the most crucial tech skills for a 21-year-old or 22-year-old in university to learn to make an impact on nature and the climate crisis? That's just a really hard question. Like I said, literally, anything. Yes, you could specialize in GIS, you could specialize in ecology, you could specialize in biology and conservation. I think what's necessary in this space right now is that there's the phrase that was attributed to Mark Andreessen, of Andreessen Horowitz, where he said that software is eating the world, and it is meant to say that the internet and the digital revolution will impact every industry, every space, and it's far proving pretty true. Our argument is that nature is at this situation, and the reason why it's happened is because where it used to be the world of theoretical mathematicians, and then moved into applied mathematicians, and then into engineers, and then eventually software developers, and eventually now everyone can be a developer, I mean, now with AI, you don't even need to learn how to code any concrete programs, we need to have that moment in nature where we're moving from the PhDs that are taking, you know, cost a lot of money to fly down, to preserve some of my depth through their work to the nature engineers, and in our case, specifically nature engineers means the people that are taking existing technologies and that are setting them up. They're collecting data samples, they're maintaining camera traps, they're reporting, they're coordinating, they're rapid testing and prototyping. Those engineers, that's the next, like, that's the global cadre that we need, and the unique opportunity that we have in terms of just social and environmental justice is that a lot of those engineers can be the frontline community members themselves, the people who are already there, and it means compensation for job, well done, it means mak, like remuneration for the stewardship work they're already doing in a way that is more rigorous towards, you know, philanthropists that are a little afraid to just send money blindly, that nature data should be the, basically, the sort of return part of the relationship for the pay that. So there's a really unique opportunity to bring in that human capital, and I would say for 21, 22 year olds interested in space, whatever you're interested already, and if you care about nature as well, keep that in mind. We need more writers, we need more people that can take difficult technical conversations and bring them to, you know, the individual. We need more marketers, we need more photographers even, we definitely need more entrepreneurs, ideally entrepreneurs that have done something else because they have experienced just commercialization, you know, that's super important. So really all hands on deck. So my final question is that, what do you think is a way forward for a nature tech collective, what have been some challenges that you have faced as an organization, and yeah, how can talk a bit more about how individuals can join the collective? Yeah, so, I mean, we have the basic startup challenges, right? We as a nature tech collective, as the name exists for just over a year, but overall, you know, two and a half, called maybe three years in a stretch. So we're a young underfunded organization. This year we introduced membership fees, so our members were really becoming owners in a way and it's been amazing on many fronts, but, you know, it's a slow progress, so we need to onboard more paid members, but if you see our community in action this year versus last year, it's way more active, which is exactly what we want to see. And we're just like we're hustling to make sure that a nature tech term is used ubiquitously and it's starting to take shape, so we're starting to see the progress. Our challenges now I would say is maintaining and pushing the momentum, COP 16 will be big for us. And then one of the things we're going to do a COP is actually we're going to put together a couple of closed door workshops where we'll bring the smartest people we know together and help us crystallize what are the highest impact opportunities to invest/work on to break through where we are right now to as a nature tech adoption value to the next level. And these are what we call the big hairy audacious challenges. Things like could we set up a global standard for nature data collection and set the president to make nature data collection a public good, so the whole world gets access to it. Could we do the same thing for nature data sharing? You know, could we get Coke to share its water data with Pepsi? Because Coke probably has more water data than anyone else in the world. Could we build a third party institute that in a neutral way goes bio by bio technology by technology methodology by methodology and it comes out with a playbook for what is the most effective way for, you know, a certain intervention? For example, if you're thinking about doing regenerative cattle in the pump bus in Argentina, X and Y are the best technologies for measurement and for monitoring and Z is the best intervention. The list of best interventions called Silver pasture or, you know, using Fitbit type sensors to move the cows around whatever, right? So we're going to be fun, hopefully by the end of the year we'll have the one or two big ticket items that we'll fight for and that's what we'll do. So our challenges is getting more people involved. Ideally, we get more project developers, we get more corporates involved, we get more NGOs involved and more individuals that want to support to join us. So that's our call. It's very easy to reach me if you lied at naturetechcollective.org, just go to the website, fill out your name, we'll get in touch with you pretty shortly. We have an amazing community lead, we have amazing members, we have an amazing ecosystem and it's very easy to get excited every day in the morning because of the mission we're here to achieve, which is to make sure that we'll have a healthy world together. Effective coexistence between humanity and the rest of nature. So join us. Yeah, I'll be putting the links to your website and your email in the description of the podcast that people can reach out to you directly. Oh yeah, so that was the final question I had for you, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, yeah, thank you for pushing this message forward on each and anywhere I can help you and your work. Let me know.