Augmented Nature: Scaling Marine Restoration with AI and Natural Capital Intelligence

Session Description

This session tackled what the team called the "acceleration gap": nature recovers too slowly to keep pace with the climate crisis, and monitoring that recovery has traditionally been manual, expensive, and disconnected from financial decision-making. Repsol, joined by partner Ocean Eco Structures, walked through a three-part answer. Biomimetic reef structures speed up marine life recovery beyond natural rates. Underwater robots and AI monitor that recovery without the usual cost and labour barriers. And Repsol's Reads methodology converts the resulting biological data into ecosystem services and blue carbon values that finance and sustainability teams can actually use.

Speakers

• Elena Aguirre, Repsol

• Isaac Najera, Reads

• Ana Lloveras, Ocean Eco Structures

Watch the Session Recording

Key Takeaways

• Ecosystems recover too slowly on their own, and monitoring that recovery has traditionally been manual and expensive, disconnecting restoration from the financial decisions that could fund more of it. The session framed this as the "acceleration gap."

• Ocean Eco Structures builds biomimetic reef units (LBU® technology) designed to catalyse marine life recovery faster than natural processes alone, installed on infrastructure like port walls, wind farm foundations, and subsea cables.

• Underwater drones fitted with cameras and sonar monitor these installations, and AI interprets the footage to track species, coverage, and biomass growth, cutting down the manual labour Ocean Eco Structures says is normally required.

• Repsol's Reads methodology converts that biological data into ecosystem services and blue carbon valuations, using ISO 14007/14008 techniques and the Natural Capital Protocol. Isaac Najera described it as a TNFD-approved tool fully aligned with CSRD.

• In one worked example, a port, a three-turbine offshore wind farm, and a 5km submarine cable, Reads calculated a 2026 residual environmental impact of roughly 826,000 in monetised "impact units," with the port responsible for most of it.

• Installing reef units along the cable corridor and around the port generated an estimated €1.3 million in positive natural capital value over 15 years, with 95% of that benefit coming from ecosystem services rather than carbon capture, treated as a secondary co-benefit.

• Comparing the two approaches in this example: standard mitigation spending returned about $78 of natural capital benefit per $1,000 invested, while restoration spending returned about $227 per $1,000, a notably better cost-benefit outcome in this specific case.

• Some impacts, like bird mortality from turbine strikes, can't be offset by marine restoration at all. Isaac Najera also noted the model adjusts for species conservation status, weighting impact on a critically endangered population more heavily than on a species of lesser concern.

• Asked about discounting future environmental value, Isaac Najera said Repsol can and does set the discount rate to zero for sensitive projects, citing a seabird protection project in Alaska where discounting future harm didn't make sense.

• Asked who's actually buying marine restoration today, Ana Lloveras said the primary driver is compliance with restoration law among corporates operating in or near marine environments, with a smaller group motivated by reputation, and growing interest in oceans specifically as attention broadens beyond forest-based nature projects.