Restoring nature: can data halt biodiversity loss? | Sponsored
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. According to a recent study, the annual State of Nature report, nearly one in six of more than ten thousand species assessed – that's 16 per cent – could be lost. Many key habitats for our nature are at risk, and this is a problem both for biodiversity but also for our ability to cope with the climate crisis. How can we protect and restore nature? And what role can technology play?
In response to this challenge, the Natural History Museum and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched a groundbreaking partnership to develop an innovative new tool which brings together a broad range of UK biodiversity and environmental data types in one place in real time. This will help the Museum’s scientists to build on scientific understanding of the UK’s biodiversity and environment, and drive forward science-led nature recovery in the UK’s urban spaces.
In this special episode, The New Statesman’s Chris Stone meets Doug Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum, and Hilary Tam, Principal for Sustainability Transformation at AWS to find out how the Data Ecosystem works and how they hope it might help reverse nature loss in Britain.
This episode is sponsored by Amazon Web Services. To find out more about their partnership with the Natural History Museum, visit https://aws.amazon.com/uki/cloud-services/sustainability-aws-and-nhm/
Read more about how AWS can help you Transform your legacy IT infrastructure into a modern, scalable and secure cloud environment: https://www.newstatesman.com/companies/amazon-web-services-aws
Get involved with Nature Overheard: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/take-part/monitor-and-encourage-nature/nature-overheard.html
Visit the Urban Nature project from Summer 2024: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/urban-nature-project.html
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:06.0 | Pretty much anything we look at tells us that life is under threat. |
| 0:10.0 | No one organization is going to be able to solve these challenges. |
| 0:14.0 | If we look at habitats, we see them disappearing, |
| 0:17.0 | if we look at species extinction rates, we know they're running somewhere |
| 0:20.0 | between 100 and 1,000 times the natural rate. |
| 0:22.0 | Everyone's got a different piece of the puzzle. |
| 0:24.7 | That nature that we all depend on |
| 0:26.5 | is under huge pressure, |
| 0:27.7 | to the point where some people are calling this |
| 0:29.4 | almost a sixth mass extinction. |
| 0:32.2 | We're leveraging advanced technology, Internet of things, machine learning, artificial |
| 0:37.8 | intelligence, to be able to apply to challenges and solutions that we haven't been able to before. |
| 0:45.0 | We know the world is heating up. |
| 0:50.0 | The global consensus is that we need to decarbonize to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees. |
| 0:57.5 | But there is another element of climate action that gets arguably less attention. biodiversity loss and nature preservation. |
| 1:05.9 | In 2022, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference |
| 1:10.2 | for the first time agreed a new set of goals to halt and reverse nature loss, |
| 1:15.8 | to protect 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. |
| 1:22.0 | But these are complex problems requiring collaborative solutions. |
| 1:27.0 | How can we reverse such dramatic decline? |
| 1:31.0 | In a world-first partnership, the Natural History Museum and Amazon Web Services |
... |
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