Biodiversity law and regulation
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Satellites have been used for decades to track deforestation in the Amazon
This rising interest in determining environmental risk and financial materiality for companies also coincides with improvements in satellite technology and machine learning. Geospatial data will increasingly be used by third parties and regulators to scrutinise environmental impacts of corporations and their assets. Applications are being developed to track and monitor deforestation, marine oil spills, wildfires, methane emissions, and carbon emissions predictions from the heat profile of factories. 249 The NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission will be launched in 2023 to measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater. 250 Satellites have been used for decades to track deforestation in the Amazon. 251 The images on the left show degradation of the Amazon and conversion of the forest to plantations between 2001 and 2019 tracked from space by Nasa.
THE CHALLENGES OF TRACKING BIODIVERSITY FROM SPACE
There are challenges with tracking biodiversity from space and WWF’s 2022 Geospatial ESG report concludes that no group or product has yet achieved what might be considered the “holy grail” in this area: a means of scrutinising the impact of commercial operations on biodiversity at a global scale at high temporal frequency. The WWF report also highlights that there is a greenwashing danger in using inadequate technologies: “Assuming that a dataset meaningfully captures an environmental metric more than it actually does creates the potential for actors to falsely believe their exposure is less than it is, or that specific companies or assets have higher exposure. This ultimately has the potential to aid greenwashing, derailing trust in the ESG process of trying to realign capital to support nature recovery, or to slow the effectiveness of the realignment.” 252
252 The emerging application of geospatial data for gaining ‘environmental’ insights on the asset, corporate and sovereign level,WWF, January 2022.
249 The emerging application of geospatial data for gaining ‘environmental’ insights on the asset, corporate and sovereign level,WWF, January 2022. 250 Quick Facts, NASA-ISRO SAR Mission. 251 Tracking Amazon Deforestation from Above (nasa.gov)
Source: NASA
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