ConservAxion by Regenerative Space

ConservAxion by Regenerative SPACE, offers a funding mechanism for nature-based solutions to build resilience at the local level. 

This cloud-hosted platform innovatively integrates various technologies to ensure complete transparency, traceability and accountability.  Geospatial technologies (GIS, remote sensing and What3Words) consumed with autonomous data collection through the Internet of Things (IoT) and field collected information by practitioners and, more broadly, local citizens, will provide validation and targets met. This platform connects willing donors, funders and investors directly to programmes and projects aligned to their passions and desired funding outcomes. Transactions will be legitimised and made by code-contracts within the geo-blockchain, releasing financial transactions to programmes, projects, and communities. 

ConservAxion is designed to address socio-environmental challenges through strengthening local circular green economies, as well as addressing biodiversity loss.  It will direct conservation and development projects that are open, transparent and optimized, rather than driven by maximum profit and purely commercial interests.

There are extremely high levels of unemployment especially in southern Africa. The threats to biodiversity are common knowledge, yet remain unattended to, and are often underfunded. Although known, details of biodiversity value and loss are lacking and their stories untold to ordinary people.   

People and conservation are inseparable. However, these are dealt with separately and this siloed approach results in further disconnect between nature’s offering and support to humankind, and the inherent benefits that there are for communities is undervalued, or under calculated.

Our experience shows lack of funding to conservation efforts and an over-reliance on tourism to support and augment these. This has been especially exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. These limited funds are often misspent, or mis-reported regarding their impacted targets. Further spillage of funds are a result of too many intermediates and brokerages, reducing spend on the ground and to the intended communities who most need them.

Conservationists are often conservative in their approach to, and their application of technologies. The fast tracking of natural assets, and natural capital for support to humankind through data collection, information dissemination and the banking of knowledge is lacking. 

Our solution is the development of an easily accessible funding platform, through the integration of systems and services of engagement. The innovative use of existing technologies is designed to ensure transparency, traceability and accountability. Geospatial technologies (GIS, remote sensing and the use of What3Words) consumed with autonomous data collection through the Internet of Things (IoT) and field collected information by practitioners and, ordinary people (citizens) will provide validation and proof-of-work. These workflows, enabled by code-contracts within the geo-blockchain, will release financial transactions to projects.

The platform offers a direct connect for ordinary people to extraordinary conservation and community projects. This connect can out of pure interest, or entice funding through an adopt-a-block approach to (or direct) support these project outcomes. Not only will these funds directly assist projects, but the very nature of the platform also ensures that these contributions meet local biodiversity and sustainability goals. In addition, these funds promote the creation of jobs through the development of green and circular economies to operationalize nature-based solutions on a landscape level.

In so doing the platform models an integrated approach of harmonising socio-economic development and biodiversity conservation under an umbrella of nature-based solutions.  

Our solution will serve:

• 1) Ordinary People - a more direct and immersive experience of others’ lives across the globe, their value of, and reliance on ecosystem services. A deeper understanding of biodiversity value in a user-friendly consumable manner.
• 2) Conservation Programmes and Projects – underfunded and worthy projects requiring funding support, or merely an awareness of their plight and endeavours. Ensuring that these Landscapes that will be better off because of nature-based solutions.
• 3) Community Programmes and Projects – similarly a funding conduit to community endeavours and an awareness of their outcomes, in addition Local communities who will benefit from jobs created as part of the development of local green economies and value chains.
• 4) Other entities, such as organizations and researchers working with biodiversity conservation and community green economies, will gain access to a funding tool.

Our Pilot Project includes local wood cutters and their families from the Overberg district in the Western Cape of South Africa. These woodcutters have been permitted seasonal access to alien invasive plant species on private land to forge a living for themselves.

Our platform through creating an awareness of who these community members are, and the exposure we offer to a year-round market, often them a more secure and sustainable livelihoods.

These alien invasive species, which now consume a dominant portion of the landscape in the Western Cape, threaten the biodiversity richness of the fynbos Kingdom. In addition, their presence exacerbates an already drought prone region of South Africa, and the accumulated fire risk in the dry season further threatens this ecologically sensitive flora.

Landowners battle to control and eradicate alien invasive plant species from their land. We identify land with alien infestation and negotiate with landowners to offer access to, and the eradication of these alien plants. Rehabilitation projects will succeed the clearing, and thus further create job opportunities to curate regenerative native species projects.

Regenerative Space have identified a European market for fire-food. These consumers are made aware of the eradication process and that their wood fuel is an alien invasive and is assisting with job creation and the regeneration of biodiversity. They are offered a link, via the packaging of the wood, to learn more about the projects. They are able to follow the supply chain storyline of the entire process and offer augmented funding, and carbon offsetting to the project, through an adopt-a-block.

Evidence accumulated through the Pilot will allow us to onboard Programme and Project proponents to ConservAxion and have these elicit funding support from ordinary people. 

For ecosystems to be more resilient, it is our belief and approach that there needs to be a better understanding of ecosystem services. Our premise with ConservAxion is to offer the ordinary person a platform to become informed of, contribute to, and follow progressive stories of the importance of these services to local people, to biodiversity value and to the supply of food and spiritual wellbeing. Thus, enticing a direct awareness of, and a direct contribution to sustainable projects. Custodians of these ecosystem services, communities, programmes and projects, are directly linked and offered access to financial capital for ecosystem services.   

Although we predominantly fall under the prototype definition, we are piloting our work with a local community in testing and refining the services we will offer through the platform. This Pilot is to take place in the western cape, South Africa. We have refined workflows for each each of the constituent systems, and through the pilot we are now integrating these systems and services to collect, measure, monitor, analyse and transact. The primary purpose of the pilot is to buildout and demonstrate the purpose and function of the blockchain, which is the recording of data-points for validation, and the automation and triggering of next actions in key workflows. 

Our experience and knowledge of geospatial technologies and their value in analysing, monitoring and reporting on biophysical dynamics of landscapes has had a recent catalytic boost by the processing capabilities of the Open Data Cube. The Internet of Things’ (IoT) wide scale data collection capabilities in remote areas has permitted the scaling, validating and collating of information.

Cloud computing, offering services and micro-service capabilities, allows for an integration of systems and services and that of data and information to collate purpose and functionality from traditionally disparate sources.

By employing What3Words and thus sharing fine scaled mapped indices of natural capital, biodiversity value, and land use potential, we are able to link ordinary people/ citizens to specific landscapes’ conservation and community efforts.

All the above data and workflows are underpinned by the blockchain, the geo-blockchain, to ensure integrity, transparency, immutability and as importantly to allow for the use of and functionality of code contracts facilitated by human-in-the-loop processing.

We firmly believe that our innovation is that of the combining of these existing technologies in a novel way, linked to – and enticing support - from ordinary people/ citizens through Adopt-a-Block is unique. 

Currently our solution (our pilot project) serves 20 odd people by providing short-term jobs for 10 wood cutters as primary harvesters of invasive alien plant species, and processing it into firewood for the retail market in the United Kingdom.  An additional 10 short-term jobs are created in the green value chain during storage, packing, palletising, and distribution.  These 20 odd people are most likely the primary breadwinners of their families, our solution thus serves at least 80 odd people as each of them will have at least four dependents.  At the moment these jobs are “short-term” because we are still in the process of establishing a strong green value chain. 

 Within the next year our pilot solution, will serve 160 odd people.  Jobs for wood cutters and the processing into firewood, additional jobs in the green value chain can realistically increase ten times.  Our solution will serve minimum 640 people as dependents of the 160 woodcutters.  These jobs will no longer be “short-term”, but permanent due to the developed green value chain.  Figures are based on realistic market size projections and off-take agreements. Within five years’ from now from first pilot solution further 20% growth as additional green value chains will come online is envisaged. 

 This is based purely on the pilot project we are running, we hope for many such initiatives to be incubated through ConservAxion by Regenerative Space. 

Inherent and intrinsic to ConservAxion is the ability to report and measure progress. In his previous job and role, Craig Beech identified and experiencing the lack of efficient monitoring, evaluation and reporting capabilities. These can be easily implemented by means of data collection tools and protocols which feed real-time reporting by means of dashboarding and business intelligence. Story telling using visually rich capabilities of geospatially technologies consumed and disseminated through social media will further broadcast all and every progress which is being made with minor and major projects, targets and goals. Furthermore, the employment of the distributed ledger seeks to offer this in an open and transparent manner.

All programmes and projects we incubate, support and seek to make sustainable will be measured, monitored and reported on using these above-mentioned mechanisms offered by ConservAxion by Regenerative Space. The administration, daily running of, and support to ConservAxion by Regenerative Space will also be administered and reported on using the same mechanism offered to our project proponents. 

Full-time Staff: 5

Part-Time: 3

Contractors: 2

Volunteers: 5

Carla Ackerman studied political science and worked in provincial government. She focused on gender in socio-economic development for two decades. With this she has an understanding of the interdependence between human development and the natural environment. Since 2019 she has focused on green economic developments.

Jan Vingerhoets has experience in data collection and analysis on wildcat oil rigs to computer programming in San Francisco, and the running of a waste-to-energy company in Johannesburg. “Through Regenerative SPACE, we seek to collaborate with exciting initiatives around the world aligned to our principles, while researching and developing solutions for the local context.

Paul Bewsher - a practicing geographer with 30 years experience. Paul combines environmental and spatial knowledge with an understanding of policy issues. He has worked on small scale projects to large national parks and transfrontier conservation areas and World Heritage Sites. Paul uses ecotourism as an approach to conservation, by distilling a wide range of disparate information sources into business models.

Grant Benn has knowledge in operating spatial technologies for over 20 years, with primary focus in environmental management and conservation sectors. Grant has always employed information technology as a research tool, and to enrich presentation and visualisation of results. Grant has experience in enterprise-level spatial intelligence systems.

Craig Beech has experience in applied conservation technologies, with experience in geospatial technologies. He endorses human centered design thinking. The architecture of ConservAxion by Regenerative Space stems from his experience in the conservation sector, where limited funds often miss their intended target spend.

The formation of our leadership team is first and foremost based on skills, expertise and experience.  As a not-for-profit South African company we are acutely aware of “diversity”, equity” and “inclusivity”.   This is important to us not only with reference to our leadership team, but also in terms of the local communities whom we serve through our green value chain solutions.  Most of these communities are previously disadvantaged, i.e. people who were excluded from voting prior to 1994.  All six directors of Regenerative SPACE are passionate about creating opportunities for growth and empowerment for the communities that we work with, the communities that we serve. This is done through, for example, facilitating access to skills development, mentoring, and economic empowerment via the establishment of financially viable local green enterprises.  On a leadership level we recognize that innovation and creativity are stimulated through diversity – and that one has to be open and accepting in order to allow inclusivity.  Our company operating structure, decision-making and financial arrangements are all based on equitable sharing of both benefits and responsibilities.  As a not-for-profit company driving nature-based solutions that equally value people and the planet, we are committed to face up to and positively address “diversity”, equity” and “inclusivity”.  We do not tolerate discrimination of any form.  We do not tolerate the othering of people.  We stand for “both / and”, not “either / or”.  

As can be noted from our team, we have backgrounds in conservation mostly, social sciences, and levels of 'dabbling in technologies'. We believe our innovation is practical and very applicable to provide solutions to a wide range of challenges and problems relating to ecosystem services. 

Applying to Solve offers us access to similar minded people, and with this network, we realize that we will gain deeper understanding, and answers to the question we ask ourselves constantly "why this will not work".

Our design thinking, our technical architecture and details, if we are selected, will now have soundboards to refine the approach, integrations and details to build out ConservAxion for Regenerative Space. 

Despite our partnering and inputs we have had and are engaged in, and extensive debates regarding the most suitable knowledge and expertise injection into our solution, we are cognizant of geographically focalized inputs in what we would seek to offer as a global solution, and as such would value any and all inputs which would allow for a wider adoption, subscription and reach. 

None at this time, based on our working with existing partners and in time we may well learn of knowledge and inputs needs we have from MIT faculties, and other Solve members.