New York City, Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, at New York Climate Week, Restor announces its new transparency tool, Restor Enterprise – supporting and enabling organizations, financial institutions, and governments on their journey to better understand their impact on nature, to map the projects and communities they are working with, and facilitate allocation of finance. The tool will aid trust building and transparency in the nature movement, providing the ability to show how and where investments in nature are being made, contributing to closing the $700 billion annual financing gap needed for nature outlined by the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Restor announces this tool alongside the governments of Costa Rica and Ethiopia, and Salesforce, Manulife, Community Climate Solutions, UBS Optimus, WWF, The Earthshot Prize, Naia Trust, Nzatu, and Climeworks. These leaders join the larger network of actors visible on Restor working with nature, restoration, conservation and sustainable agricultural projects covering 167 million hectares.
The Government of Costa Rica has pioneered the use of Restor by transparently showcasing the ecological impacts of its Payment for Ecosystem Services program (PES,). New science suggests this program is the first national-scale evidence that the direct distribution of wealth towards local land stewards can reverse biodiversity loss at a national scale. The government of Ethiopia is now also using the tool to bring transparency to its nature programs.
Joining the movement, major organizations including Salesforce, Manulife, Community Climate Solutions and Climeworks are utilizing Restor Enterprise to map, understand and manage their nature impact and partnerships. Leveraging data layers including water dynamics, vegetative growth rate, carbon levels, biodiversity indices, forest cover change over time, and high-resolution satellite imagery, Restor is advancing transparency for its partners, users, and the broader nature movement.
"We know that the equitable redistribution of power and wealth must be central to global environmental goals. By collaborating with the Costa Rican Government, we have been able to prove exactly that. Restor Enterprise allows us to put this knowledge into action and enable the transparent allocation of finance towards local land stewards who have the expertise to ignite large-scale restoration of conservation and biodiversity” shared Thomas Crowther, professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. “We are incredibly excited that these leading governments, financial institutions and businesses are advancing principles of transparency whilst championing channeling finance to the local stewards of nature. We encourage others to step up and do the same."
Restor’s platform was built with initial support from Google Creative Labs, and is powered by Google Earth Engine, combining the best-in-class technology and science to support the acceleration of the protection and restoration of ecosystems for the well-being of local people. Since 2021, with philanthropic support from Google.org, the Gantner family, the Ursimone Wietlisbach Foundation, Salesforce Foundation, Coleman Family Ventures, XTX Markets and others, Restor has been building a bottom up movement by democratizing access to data and financing to support and promote the local stewards of nature across the globe.
The launch of Restor Enterprise is a watershed moment for environmental transparency and accountability. Google.org has been proud to support Restor and their continued empowerment of local communities. This tool gives organizations and governments the power to not only showcase their commitment to nature, but also to prove their impact in a way that's verifiable. By enabling the transparent flow of funds to those directly stewarding our planet, we're not just restoring ecosystems, we're restoring trust." Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of AI & Sustainability, Google.org
Restor now supports over 200,000 projects of local communities, farmers, and indigenous populations working to promote nature by connecting them to funders, markets and to one another. Restor Enterprise marks a significant step in expanding this mission to include businesses and governments, enhancing their ability to transparently demonstrate their commitment to nature restoration. Restor Enterprise will be supporting companies with their reporting to frameworks such as those in development by the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), incorporating a groundbreaking new measurement for the state of nature for every terrestrial pixel on Earth – SEED, launching at COP16 Colombia.
"Restor envisions a world where every action positively impacts nature. To build this world, we need science and cutting-edge technology to make visible the actions of millions of local peoples and reward them for regeneratively managing the lands we all depend on. This is why we developed Restor Enterprise: to bring full transparency to the environmental movement, fostering the accountability and trust needed for a truly equitable movement. It is time for businesses and governments to step up, be brave and help deliver a more sustainable world," shared Thomas Elliott, CEO of Restor.
Restor is an Earthshot Prize Finalist and an official partner of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. To learn more about Restor and Restor Enterprise, visit: www.restor.eco
LAUNCH PARTNER QUOTES
"Nature and climate movements require us to be more transparent than ever before so that we can build trust, learn from one another, and achieve progress together, faster," says Tim Christophersen, VP, Climate Action, Salesforce. "We are proud to join Restor Enterprise as its first corporate partner to bring new levels of transparency to nature restoration and conservation projects that are helping solve some of the world's most urgent climate challenges."
Professor Eyasu Elias, State Minister, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of Ethiopia: "Restor Enterprise is a powerful tool for showing our stakeholders around the globe exactly what we are doing on the ground. It enhances awareness, demonstrates our credibility, and highlights our commitment to transparency at a time when the environmental movement is facing a 'crisis of trust.' It helps us prioritize regions most threatened by environmental degradation and assess the impact of our interventions on ecosystem services such as biodiversity regeneration, soil replenishment, biomass improvement, and carbon storage. As we confront both climate and biodiversity crises, Restor Enterprise enables us to provide detailed insights into our environmental initiatives, be completely transparent with civil society, and achieve sustainable development goals."
“As the world's largest manager of natural capital with over $21 billion in timberland and agriculture assets under management4, we have a fundamental interest in safeguarding our planet’s ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural resources,” shared Sarah Chapman, Global Chief Sustainability Officer, Manulife. “That’s why we’re proud to be partnering with Restor on their unique digital, data-driven platform, which will allow us to enhance our measurement, management, and transparency initiatives to make an even deeper impact with the natural capital assets we manage and in the communities where we operate.” - Sarah Chapman, Global Chief Sustainability Officer, Manulife
“We at Community Climate Solutions are convinced that sustainable restoration can only be successful if a symbiosis between communities, nature and climate is created. We will do this by incentivizing hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers to capture carbon in their fields and the surrounding woodlands, lifting them out of poverty. To provide maximum transparency on climate and social impact, we are excited to partner with Restor Enterprise on a groundbreaking farmer-to-purchaser traceability tool. It will enable every customer to trace and verify every carbon credit all the way to the smallholder farmer it originated from – and thereby provide an unprecedented level of transparency to carbon markets.” Samuel Gantner, Founder of Community Climate Solutions
Adrian Siegrist, Chief Commercial Officer of Climeworks: "Transparency is top of mind for every partner that we speak to, and it is top of mind for us. Whether in our direct air capture operations or our portfolio offering, Climeworks Solutions, we ensure that one ton of CO2 purchased is one ton of CO2 removed. Restor Enterprise allows clients to quite literally zoom in on our expert-vetted restoration projects, bringing to light their benefits for the planet and communities that we so urgently need in the fight against climate change."
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About Restor
Creating a world where every action positively impacts nature. Restor is an open-data, geospatial platform that offers nature stewards access to the latest ecological science for impact storytelling. With over 200,000+ sites, Restor is the largest network of community-led restoration and conservation efforts across the globe. Through Restor, governments, companies, impact funders and financial institutions can connect and contribute to the regenerative use of the land we all depend on. Find out more here: www.restor.eco
Visit Restor and sign up today, and view our trailer and media kit here.
About Global Biodiversity Consortium
The Global Biodiversity Consortium (GBC) is a unique coalition of initiatives that brings together cutting-edge knowledge in global ecological research (Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich), a globally-standardized biodiversity metric providing a holistic, high-resolution measure of the state of nature for every terrestrial location on Earth (SEED Biodiversity Index), and a unifying geospatial platform that supports nature stewards and enhances decision making to accelerate conservation and restoration of the ecosystems we all depend on (Restor).
[1] Fonafifo, Payment of Environmental Services
[2] UNFCCC, Payments For Environmental Services Program | Costa Rica
[3] Delgado, G. L., van den Hoogen, J., Dent, D. H., Bradfer-Lawrence, T., Werden, L. K., Cole, R., Diaz Quesada, C., Jimenez Fajarado, J.-A., Méndez Rodríguez, A., Mesén Solorzano, E., Navarrete Chacón, G., Coto, M., Suarez Perez, I., Vahlas, L., Liang, Y., & Crowther, T. W. (2024). Large-scale recovery in Costa Rica’s payment for ecosystem service program. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.03.610944v1
[4] IPE Real Assets Top 25 Natural Capital Managers 2024 - https://www.manulifeim.com/institutional/global/en/resources/documents/2024-ipe-real-assets-top-25-natural-capital-managers. Ranking is based on total natural capital assets under management (AUM), which include forestry/timberland and agriculture/farmland AUM. Firms were asked to provide AUM and the as of dates vary from as at 31 December 2022, to 31 December 2023
