Three, Sixty: With Meg Brennan

This is an extract from Issue 72 of SDG Alpha, my newsletter that casts an Irish lens on the world of Impact Investment, Innovation, and Sustainability. In these regular features, I pose three questions on the theme of sustainability to an impact entrepreneur or innovator, to get a better understanding in sixty seconds of how they’re working to achieve the SDG targets.

For this issue, I spoke with Meg Brennan, the co-founder of Polliknow, an early-stage Irish company developing devices to make monitoring wild pollinators easy.

On a personal level, what impacts of the climate crises are you most concerned about?

Half of our global GDP directly relies directly on nature’s resources ($58 trillion) and we are exploiting it at a rate far above what we’re restoring at the moment. Since the 1970’s alone we now know we’ve lost 68% percent of all documented wildlife on earth which has fundamentally changed ecosystem operation in many areas.

Ecosystems regulate climate processes, decompose waste and recycle nutrients, filter and purify water, protect against flooding, maintain soil fertility, clean the air, and supply natural resources like wood, textiles, and food. To allow continued biodiversity loss means losing the essential services that biodiversity provides.

What concerns me is how poorly we currently track nature and biodiversity. For example, everyday we know that approximately 100,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest is burned or cut down to be converted for profit, however we have no idea of the amount of insects, mammals, birds, bats etc. are killed/ displaced because of this because we don’t measure it. The ICUN Red List which is one of the most comprehensive databases, only has the data to assess 7% of all species on Earth.

Which UN SDG’s did you start Polliknow to address?

Polliknow empowers organisations to easily get verifiable biodiversity data on pollinator populations.

Insect pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystem management and world food production. 75% of the food we eat needs animal pollination and 80% of wild plant life also needs pollination to reproduce.

The health of pollinators is therefore linked with five of the UN SDG goals: SDG 2 - Zero Hunger, SDG 3- Good Health and Well Being, SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production SDG 13 - Climate Action and SDG 15- Life on Land.

How does your business model enable the transition to a low carbon or more sustainable future?

The model of not tracking our natural resources and biodiversity closely has not served us well to date. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and I believe that if we can better measure, track and understand biodiversity we can halt and reverse the decline.

We lease and sell our devices to organisations and rewilding projects who can track the volume and diversity of pollinators on their sites year on year. Our system captures real-time data, offering detailed insights into pollinator activity, biodiversity, and ecosystem health.

We believe in the future there will be several specialized biodiversity measurement services and when these are combined we can get a much clearer picture of ecosystem health and can fully integrate natural capital into every company’s balance sheet to drive change.