In early 2021, Finance for Biodiversity (F4B), in partnership with the Green Digital Finance Alliance (GDFA), initiated a sprint process to scope out the minimum features of a potential data platform solution, to accelerate the diffusion of biodiversity risk accounting across financial and capital markets.
The sprint process lasted for a period of three months, and engaged 44 institutions in bilateral interviews and/or in community-level discussions through three convenings. This started the platform’s community-building process, and tested whether the financial institutions (FIs) and Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) analytics providers were interested in new ways to collaborate around asset geolocation data in biodiversity material sectors. The engagement also sought to ensure that any follow-on investments would be responding to market demand, to avoid designing a supply-driven data infrastructure.
The first output of the sprint process and various convenings is today’s Open-Source Biodiversity Data Platform Initiative Technical Scoping Paper. The document outlines the high-level platform architecture design of a new digital platform infrastructure, that would enable the financial and corporate communities to start to shape geolocation data sharing standards through new types of collaboration.
