The Hidden Power of Nature Data

by Alex Logan , CEO & Co-founder of Cecil

The world is changing, and the impacts of the global polycrisis are impossible to ignore. Unprecedented heatwaves, flooding, wildfires—sadly including the recent ones in Los Angeles—and other climate and nature shocks are disrupting both our daily lives and our assumptions about how these crises will unfold. Such disruptions aren’t just causing direct damage; the havoc also causes volatility across supply chains and markets, from crop loss to animal population collapse to train derailment, and is especially felt by the 55% of the world’s GDP (~$58 trillion) that is moderately or highly dependent on nature.

Solutions are well researched and documented. However, adaptation is happening unevenly due to the distributed nature of financing, expertise, and these disruptive events. Organisations, particularly those working with nature, are eager to act to reduce risks and seize opportunities for upside but are grappling with the challenging questions of which solutions to implement and where, especially with the limited information they have access to.

Representing our natural world through data requires a mosaic of digitised information that is collected in a spatially explicit, temporally explicit, accurate, and precise manner. While large amounts of environmental data already exist from remote sensing and field sampling sites globally, most of this data remains siloed in repositories with limited access and in technical data formats unfamiliar to even advanced data scientists. Teams frequently struggle to obtain the specific data they need, raising questions about data availability and thoughtful access that considers legal, ethical, and cultural factors.

An equitable data sharing culture could transform this landscape—properly activating this data could enhance our understanding and valuation of natural ecosystems, while celebrating and compensating land stewards, fostering cross-sector collaboration, and ultimately improving integrity in nature markets through new insights and knowledge.

The fundamentals of nature data sharing

In the ecosystem of nature data sharing, there are three key personas that play distinct but interconnected roles. Nature Practitioners, like land stewards, Indigenous Peoples and customary/traditional owners, community action groups, not-for-profit organisations, and private sector entities, form the foundation of this ecosystem: these are the groups and organisations that generate nature-related data through their work in managing, conserving, and restoring natural environments. The second persona is Data Providers: organisations specialised in transforming field data, imagery, and other raw data into sophisticated derived variables and data products (e.g., Chloris Geospatial, Impact Observatory, Kanop, and Planet Labs). The final persona is End Users: the individuals and organisations that utilise and analyse these nature data products to inform their decision-making and activities. There are many types of End Users, including forest managers, farmers, carbon credit developers (e.g., Anew and Mombak), corporates selling nature-derived products (e.g., Nestlé and Oji Paper), insurance providers (e.g., AXA and Kita), financial service providers (e.g., Norges and Morgan Stanley), and companies preparing for EUDR or other reporting requirements like TNFD.

All of these personas typically lack the expertise, resources, and/or data capability required to fully grasp their data sharing options. This results in missed opportunities, duplicated work, and siloed data. A common example today: Land stewards gather baseline field data before launching a forest carbon project. This data includes biomass and tree metrics, geospatial coordinates, text records, georeferenced images, and other relevant metadata. This data is used to certify and verify the project but otherwise often remains unused. At the same time, commercial data providers need field data for model training and validation but find it challenging to source and collect new data.

As a result, without a shared vocabulary or standardised framework, it is challenging for different groups to align on interests, risks, and mutual motivations for data sharing.

Much like with other modern data conversations, such as the right to privacy and the use of our social media data, there are plenty of complexities and nuances surrounding nature data. At the highest level, rigorous nature data sharing covers the following considerations:

• Sovereignty: The right for individuals, groups, and organisations to exercise ownership and control over data related to them, their communities, and their lands.
• Permanence: The ability to maintain control, governance, and stewardship of data, knowledge, and resources.
• Provenance: An auditable trail of the data supply chain going back to the origins of the data.
• Licensing: The terms for data sharing, ranging from Public to Open to bespoke options.

• Sensitive Data: Appropriate measures for handling data with greater risk of intended or unintended harm and misuse from the release of that data. Examples include: Personally Identifiable Information and health data (e.g., addresses); bioculture knowledge (e.g., traditional ecological knowledge); species, ecological, and location data (e.g., the location of endangered black rhinos); and commercial and competitive data.

Examples of data sharing initiatives in nature

Similar challenges once existed in venture capital, where early-stage startup founders lacked the resources and knowledge to negotiate early funding rounds. Tools like Y Combinator’s SAFE notes were created to offer balanced terms for both startups and investors. We are now seeing the development of open resources designed to promote data literacy and foster a culture of responsible, impactful, data sharing among teams working on nature.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) were developed to support Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination, right to resiliency development, and the right to control access to, use of, and benefit from research data. Research by Jennings et al. (2023) describes how researchers and institutions can apply the CARE principles and the table below builds on top of that work with recommendations for industry consumers and recipients of Indigenous data applying the four components of the CARE Principles.

Another example initiative is the Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) Data Quarry, launched by Cascade Climate with 10 ERW companies that have proactively committed to sharing datasets as part of this system. This is one of the first systems of its kind to proactively share commercial data for the benefit of broad scientific learning in the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) space.

Finally, the recently launched Nature Data Sharing Initiative (NDSI) was led by Cecil and co-developed by a group of 16 cross-sector organisations to provide an overview and guidance notes around nature data and Nature Practitioners' field data. This version also includes a data sharing worksheet and sample data sharing agreement template.

The opportunity: Rise of the data economy

If we get this right and foster a robust and equitable data sharing culture, we can not only improve the accuracy and precision of nature data globally, but also create an entire nature data economy. Existing data, previously siloed, would help fill critical gaps, like tracking the locations of the one in six IUCN-listed species that lack sufficient data. New pathways to appropriately finance and compensate data generation by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities would create best-in-class data and well-paying jobs that require their special and intimate knowledge of the land. Scientific and technological innovation would bloom alongside these Nature Practitioners, being fed by both the new data and the economy. Perhaps most importantly, it could be just in time to give us the information we need to effectively and precisely act, working with nature to mitigate the worst effects of the polycrisis.

*This article was originally published in the MCJ Newsletter on Substack.