Biodiversity: Sharing Data for Greater Protection of the Natural World

What simpler way to protect biodiversity than by setting out to understand it better?

At a time when, according to IPBES, one million animal and plant species out of the eight million known today are threatened with extinction, a new initiative sets out to encourage development partners (banks, foundations, NGOs and companies) to share more widely, biodiversity data collected during the environmental impact assessments of their projects. It has come about through the Finance in Common coalition of public development banks.

“To address biodiversity loss, it is essential to know about the distribution and health status of species”, says Julien Calas, AFD researcher specialized in biodiversity.

“Red Lists” to Keep Track of Vulnerable Species

These data are used to assess and mitigate the environmental impacts of projects. Once they have been shared and used by others, they also serve to establish red lists of threatened species, improve predictive models on the evolution of populations that have not yet been identified as endangered, establish corporate ecological footprint indicators and evaluate the effectiveness of public policies. The more numerous and freely accessible they are, the more they reduce costs and improve the quality of studies. In this way, they make it easier to evaluate the actions implemented.

Yet the scientists, policy makers, environmental agencies and consulting firms that are interested in these data still find it difficult to access them – when they exist. “Nowadays, it’s really easy to find data on the economy, health and agricultural yields, but it’s much more difficult to access data when you want to know where a species is located”, says Julien Calas. For example, there is a serious lack of data on biodiversity in many African and Asian countries.

300,000 Records Gathered per year 

During the studies and projects they finance, development banks help their clients in developing countries generate a significant amount of potentially useful raw biodiversity data. For example, according to the research office Biotope, an impact assessment conducted prior to the implementation of a project produces an average of between 500 and 1,000 raw biodiversity data points.

A development bank like AFD alone generates about 30,000 a year.

When this number is extrapolated from the main multilateral development banks, the number that can be shared with the community of biodiversity experts rises to 300,000 species occurrence records per year. The problem is that these data currently remain largely under-exploited. Indeed, only the outcomes of these studies – instead of all the data – are disseminated.

This is what the Finance in Common coalition wants to develop with the Data4Nature initiative. The objective: convince as many development banks as possible to encourage consulting firms involved in their projects to systematically share the data collected on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Officers from protected areas and NGOs can also contribute to it.

“It only takes a little extra effort for consulting firms to share these raw data in an open-access database,” says Sonia Lioret, head of energy projects at AFD. “A mechanism for the mandatory deposit of data in this type of database was set up in France in 2018. It was followed by a marked increase in available data.”  

GBIF – a Database to Enrich 

GBIF was set up by the OECD in 2011 and is both an international network and data-sharing facility financed by the governments of member countries. It provides access to an open-access biodiversity database shared on the gbif.org portal, which comprises some 1.6 billion data points from field observations, museum collections and so on, concerning 1.5 million species.

This mechanism now stands out as the most appropriate to classify and share the biodiversity data recorded in the areas where development projects are implemented. These are precisely the areas where experts lack data.

For a development bank, the tasks to be performed would include, adding a new clause to financing agreements; monitoring the publication of raw biodiversity data; and training and raising the awareness of the relevant staff. The time has come to enrich this global database – collectively.

• Thursday 10 December 11:00 to 12:30 - a webinar to present the Data4Nature initiative!
  
   
• Find out more about the Data4Nature initiative:  Data4Nature, Sharing for Greater Protection (pdf)