Overview

A biodiversity offering is a profitable product or
service that supports a species-preserving project.

Business is both the main driver of the planet's current catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the key to stemming it. One way to address this challenge is for firms to launch profitable offerings that harness market forces to fund projects that drive biodiversity enhancement. This business model minimizes the costs of such projects while maximizing their positive impacts on biodiversity. The gulf between customer interactions with such offerings and the conservation of a particular species is bridged with technological tools. The first tool builds a profitable and biodiversity-enhancing business venture via stochastic, agent-based models of business networks that span species-consuming countries and species-hosting countries. These models are optimized for profitability through the use of optimization algorithms that run on high performance computers. Customer loyalty to the offering is maintained via a second tool that creates biodiversity dashboards. These web-based dashboards display in real-time, monitoring data on the offering's impact on a targeted species. This allows customers to see for themselves how the offering is positively impacting that species. Projects are tailored to the political context of a particular biodiversity threat. This political context is comprehended by applying stream-parsing algorithms to social media commentary on the targeted political-ecological system.

Up to but not including the biodiversity dashboard, at least one precedent exists for this idea: the Bissell Pet Foundation ( Bissell Pet Foundation).

Implementation Procedure

How can a firm identify a biodiversity project and attach it to a biodiversity offering? And further, once selected, how can the firm make the offering maximally profitable and the project ecologically effective? One way to achieve these goals is for the firm to execute the following implementation procedure.

  1. Identify one or more endangered species to conserve. Call these species the set of managed species. The most-respected and credible way of determining the status of a species is its rank on the Red List Index (RLI) maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The RLI ranges from 0: Least Concern, 1: Near Threatened, 2: Vulnerable, 3: Endangered, 4: Critically Endangered, and 5: Extinct. This list is maintained by a large, world-wide group of scientists who volunteer their time to monitor and assess the status of thousands of plant and animal species. A firm would select one or more endangered or critically endangered species from this list.
  2. Identify a biodiversity project that is suited to one of the firm's areas of expertise. Attach this project to biodiversity offering by having the firm's marketing department associate the offering with it, and the firm's accounting department place the offering and project on the same budget line.
  3. Using the EMT, build a political-ecological system simulator (hereafter, simulator) of the political-ecological system that hosts these species. This simulator is a computational, stochastic model of the interactions through time of all ecosystem-affecting groups and the affected ecosystem. Use the EMT to statistically fit the simulator's parameters to a political-ecological data set.
  4. Add the planned biodiversity project to this statistically-fitted simulator and solve for the most practical ecosystem management plan (MPEMP). The MPEMP computation produces an ecosystem management plan that is both politically feasible to implement, and has the highest chance of enhancing biodiversity. The catalyst of this MPEMP is the firm's proposed biodiversity project that, under the MPEMP, is both maximally profitable and effective at enhancing biodiversity.
  5. Create a market for the biodiversity offering by advertising that if the offering is purchased, the firm will use a portion of the purchase price (its biodiversity premium) to directly contribute to biodiversity enhancement through the offering's attached biodiversity project. Do this by using data analytics to shape demand, i.e., execute a combined strategy that involves pricing, promotions, and an advertising campaign that emphasizes the biodiversity-enhancing benefits from purchasing the offering. Under this demand shaping strategy, forecast demand for the offering that trades low price for biodiversity enhancement. Minimize offering prices under the constraint that the offering's projected profit is positive.
  6. Begin the project. If the project involves operations in one or more species-hosting countries, enter into a partnership with each such country. Do this by hiring in-country liaison consultancies to aid in the development of these partnerships. These liaison consultancies would negotiate any licenses and pay any bribes needed for project implementation.
  7. Establish a feedback relationship with existing and future biodiversity-concerned customers. Do this by maintaining a biodiversity dashboard for the attached biodiversity project that displays in real time, the status of the project and its impact on the managed species. Stream this dashboard to social networking sites and create media releases to inform existing and potential customers of the project's impact on the managed species. Maintain the dashboard's credibility by hiring an auditing firm to conduct quarterly audits of the accuracy of project data being uploaded to the dashboard. Place a link to these audit reports on the dashboard.

Tools and Kits

Tool #1: Simulator Construction and MPEMP Computation. All software needed to construct a simulator and compute the MPEMP from it can be downloaded from id software.

Tool #2: Biodiversity Dashboard. JavaFX software for building a biodiversity dashboard is at dashboard software.

Kits

Each of the three types of biodiversity projects provided on this website has an associated biodiversity offering kit. Each kit contains planning documents that can be used as starting points for a firm's actual set of planning documents that they would use to implement the kit's biodiversity offering -- biodiversity project pair. A general description of each of these documents follows.

  1. overview.pdf Briefly describes those species chosen for management, what offering the firm will connect to these species, and what project will be built to help sustain them.
  2. species.pdf: Explains why a particular collection of species were selected for management. Includes their home range, their chances of becoming extinct, and their threat vectors.
  3. offering.pdf: Describes the product or service that will become the biodiversity offering. This is either an existing offering that the firm is marketing or a new offering specifically designed to appeal to biodiversity-concerned customers.
  4. project.pdf: Describes the biodiversity project that the firm's management has designed to help conserve the managed species. Also describes how the firm's production, marketing, and accounting departments will connect this project with its biodiversity offering.
  5. simulator.pdf: Describes all of the submodels making up the project's simulator. Describes what data was collected for the statistical fitting of the simulator's parameters, and describes the results of this statistical fitting exercise.
  6. mpemp.pdf: Describes how the planned biodiversity project was inserted into the simulator. Describes the MPEMP that was computed with this updated simulator.
  7. marketing.pdf: Describes all activities that will be implemented to market the biodiversity offering. Details are given as to how demand will be shaped through an appeal to the anxieties of biodiversity-concerned customers worried about species extinctions.
  8. monitoring.pdf: Describes what political-ecological metrics will be monitored in order to chart the biodiversity project's effect through time on the managed species' sustainability. Describes the technology that will be used to both collect this data in real-time, and deliver it to the biodiversity dashboard.
  9. dashboard.pdf: Describes what the biodiversity dashboard will look like. Describes why a particular department in the firm has been selected to be responsible for maintaining the monitoring program and associated dashboard. Describes the contract that will be signed with an auditing firm to audit the dashboard.

To save a kit document, click your browser's Print > Save as PDF.

In-Country Kit: An in-country operation that employs would-be rhino poachers

Farm Kit: Reducing bycatch and illegal fishing by simultaneously operating a fish farm that employs would-be fishermen; buying and scrapping large fishing vessels; and intensively patrolling a marine sanctuary

Intel Kit: A wildlife trafficking investigation operation