A New Technology-Based Tool for Building Profitable Biodiversity-Conserving Offerings

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation is an essential but too-frequently overlooked dimension of environmental sustainability. Most endangered species live in developing countries. In these countries, sustainable development projects need to leverage efforts to protect biodiversity rather than being at cross-purposes with them. To these ends, this article describes a business plan that has a firm market a biodiversity offering that is profitable and supports a biodiversity project. This project, in-turn, enhances biodiversity. Customers are kept abreast of the project’s biodiversity impacts by viewing an online biodiversity dashboard. This dashboard graphically portrays data on the project and the abundance of the targeted species. Remote sensing and other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used to pipe this data to the dashboard. For purposes of illustration, this plan is hypothetically applied to preserving the South African rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum). A set of agent submodels dynamically portrays firms in a business network that employs would-be rhino poachers. A general purpose tool for constructing these interacting submodels is detailed.

Keywords: biodiversity, sustainable business ventures, political-ecological systems, agent models, rhinoceros poaching, dashboards