A three-year strategic sponsorship agreement has been signed to support the launch and scaling of critical market infrastructure for nature-based solutions market

The Biosphere Foundation, the non-profit trading arm of the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, has teamed up with Siemens to launch and globally scale the market infrastructure to transform the natural capital sector.

The North Devon UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in South West England covers an area larger than Greater London. Biosphere Reserves are a UNESCO designation like a World Heritage Site, but rather than protecting a cultural or heritage asset, they protect internationally important ecosystems.

The partnership has created two critical infrastructure platforms to redirect private investment into the environment and climate markets:

1. The Natural Capital Marketplace, as an online trading platform to provide the market infrastructure to connect landowners, investors and ecosystem service customers (such as Carbon credits and Biodiversity Net Gain Credits).
2. The Smart Biosphere Digital Twin, providing the infrastructure to create as an ecosystem digital twin to monitor, report and validate impact in the environment, bringing together IoT sensors in the environment, big data, machine learning and earth observation. It seeks to bring the benefits of ‘Smart city’ technology to the rural and marine environment.

The Natural Capital Marketplace has been developed over two years with funding support from the Environment Agency and HM Government and has already launched across Devon, with rollout plans across the UK.

Smart Biosphere is in pilot stage on a 5km river catchment in North Devon after 18 months of development with funding support from Heart of the South West LEP, South West Water and HM Government.

Both solutions are built on Mendix™, Siemens’ industry leading, all-in-one, low-code application development platform to create a customer portal that enables local farmers, landowners, and carbon/biodiversity credit customers to purchase offsets online.  Smart Biosphere additionally benefits from Siemens Industrial IOT framework – MindSphere®- to collect, secure and structure data from multiple sensors and sources within the physical environment, water, and ground-based assets.

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