Speaking to chief experts of Tehanu AI, Tosca Tindall and Patrick McSharry, Finextra learned about their nature-finance focused business that is working to incentivise nature stewardship by creating green jobs.
Tehanu’s pilot project monitors and tracks mountain gorillas in Rwanda, forming a green jobs index that rewards pro-nature behaviour through blockchain-powered digital wallets, opening up the market for conservation-based income. The project is still in its infancy, with the main objective of building up nature as its infrastructure focus and driving capital towards biodiversity.
Tindall is the finance lead and co-founder of Tehanu, an economist with an interest in natural capital finance, and McSharry, who covers the tech elements of the project, works as a professor of AI at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Our thinking moved to this idea that at some point we're going to have to both incentivise and reward nature stewardship in these areas that are unprotected, highly biodiverse, and have communities with very low socio-economic resources,” Tindall expounded. “There are AI systems which can take large amounts of data and distill them down into these ideas of species interest, and financial platforms which can make micropayments to local community members via mobile money, and all of that can be verified and recorded on blockchain.”
Tindall describes Tehanu as a financial platform that can capitalise financial flows in nature, linking digital wallets in underbanked areas to species as a way to generate income.
Green jobs index – how does it work and where do the mountain gorillas come in?
Detailing how the pilot project works exactly, McSharry explains that they use machine learning to identify Rwandan mountain gorillas in their ‘Know Your Gorilla’ prototype, which is a precedent for ‘Know Your Species’ when they evolve to include more species. The trackers use the gorilla’s distinct nose prints to identify each gorilla, and high precision cameras are able to track them throughout the wild. This gorilla’s details are then available to the user; their name, parentage, and recognisable features.
The identity of that gorilla is linked to the digital wallet, where a certain amount is allocated. The AI platform on the app is able to digest all the data and research online on Rwandan mountain gorillas. The point of the program is to take action that will improve the life of the gorilla, and once those actions are taken then a micropayment is sent from the digital wallet to the agent through Pawaplay.
McSharry explains: “The conservation-based income piece is that we are rewarding agents on the ground directly and immediately based on what they have been doing. As it's all on a technology platform using blockchain ledger, we are able to trace all the payments, actions, and data where otherwise it would be an impact investing nightmare to bring humans to verify all the pieces.”
McSharry points out that there is a significant amount of digital adoption in East Africa, where many do not have bank accounts but do possess some form of mobile money.
“I've also been working on a green jobs index, and that's something that's really important for many developing countries, but extremely important for countries in Africa, where there's a youth dividend. If that youth dividend doesn't get access to jobs, it will become a real problem, and it's already happening in many countries,” he explains.
“Migration, but also social unrest is starting to take place. There's a reason why we want young people to have jobs, and we believe that our platform is a mechanism to create green livelihoods and effectively to assign tasks and actions to lots of young people. It would be a decent job, one that includes technology and data collection and doing really cool things. We think that these are attractive jobs that could be brought online.”
McSharry adds that the loss of biodiversity leads to serious material risks for global food supply chains, pointing to pollinators that are decreasing in population and the amount the value they bring to the ecosystem and the economy.
Developing Interspecies Money
Tindall clarifies that ‘Interspecies Money’ is a high-level concept to create financial flows between humans and other species, and that Tehanu is working to facilitate these flows.
McSharry and Tindall share that they were drawn to Rwandan mountain gorillas because of their CEO’s connections to people on the ground from previous projects, but also because of the wealth of data that is available on the species. Rwandan mountain gorillas are highly-researched, and there needs to be a large sum of data available for the platform to lay its foundation on.
Tindall states that they are still determining whether the platform should operate on a species-level, landscape-level, or individual-level.
McSharry says that they are looking at other pilot projects that focus on other primates, bats, dugongs, and trees to create more prototypes.
Addressing biodiversity and nature loss
Tindall states that their problem statement focuses on the question: ‘how can financial steams for nature be created which aren’t commoditising it?’ She emphasised that there will be a point of no turning back where nature will be the solution for the economic system currently in place, and that Tehanu was based on this philosophy that nature is the future for our economy.
McSharry outlines the use of AI technology as a positive force that can generate change and increase employment: “Here we've got something very attractive in that we were showing that AI doesn't have to be bad and evil. It can be a mechanism that can create new jobs that don't currently exist. That's very attractive to a lot of organisations, and that alone is a reason why money will need to flow into this space. We can mobilise large groups of people, we can give them new skills.”
Tindall states that they have seen interest from Central Banks in Africa, which are drawn to the financial inclusion element of the project. She highlights that catalysing nature stewardship will pave a way for the movement towards green jobs and biodiversity conservation.