Can Technology Strengthen Integrity in Nature Markets? Lessons and Innovation Gaps from the Amazon
Session Description
This session/working group examined a central question facing nature markets: can new technology actually solve the integrity problems, like unreliable baselines, permanence risk, and weak monitoring, that have drawn criticism of forest carbon projects in the Amazon, or do real gaps remain? Building on Technology and Trust in the Amazon, a report co-produced by the Amazon Investor Coalition, Nature Tech Collective, and Climate Ventures, the session brought together technologists and practitioners working directly in the region to share what they've built, then opened into a working discussion on where technology still falls short. It closed with an introduction to a newly launched Observatory of Natural Capital and Nature Finance for Latin America.
Speakers
Anna Beatriz Frietas, Amazon Investor Coalition
Owen Dehmler-Buckley, Nature Tech Collective
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Technology and Trust in the Amazon maps how digital infrastructure, territorial intelligence, geospatial monitoring, AI, blockchain, and community-based data systems are reshaping trust and integrity in carbon and environmental services markets across the Amazon. The session used its early findings as a jumping-off point for direct input from practitioners in the room.
The session opened by asking attendees working on Amazon-region solutions to introduce what they'd built, surfacing a range of approaches to strengthening integrity in nature markets.
Nick, co-founder of Transparency, described a geospatial platform that aggregates public and commercial datasets for carbon market project developers in Brazil. The company started by helping developers explain complex projects in accessible terms, since most people can't or won't read a thousand-page project design document, and has since expanded into due diligence and digital MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) work using satellite data to assess project integrity.
Peter Sparrow, CEO of NatureEquity, presented work in Borneo (not the Amazon, but offered as a comparable rainforest case) where his company provides natural capital valuations, treating nature as an infrastructure investment. Local communities own the biodiversity credits generated and sell them to developers needing to offset environmental impact. The model covers seven domains, including social and community outcomes alongside habitat, carbon, and water, and is built on existing accounting methods rather than a new metric. Asked what's missing to bring this model to the Amazon, Sparrow pointed to the importance of starting with community engagement and building the product around the community itself.
A speaker from Samauma described work empowering local leadership in the Amazon and other Brazilian regions to negotiate more favourable terms with developers, using shared knowledge and digital tools to level the playing field in those negotiations.
Rob Pelcher, co-founder of Treeconomy, a London-based company working across more than 50,000 hectares in the Brazilian Amazon and in 46 countries overall, described supporting nature-based project developers, and increasingly natural capital investors, with eligibility screening, due diligence, and help quantifying and evidencing additionality and baselines, then connecting projects to funding through offtakes and project finance.
Discussion at individual tables raised an ongoing tension in the sector: whether biodiversity credits can or should be standardised the way carbon credits have been, given that ecosystem complexity varies enormously by region, or whether forcing standardisation for the sake of scalability risks losing the local specificity that makes biodiversity metrics meaningful in the first place.
The session closed with an introduction to the newly launched Observatory of Natural Capital and Nature Finance in Latin America, a collaborative knowledge and capacity-building platform developed with Sustentar (an NTC member organisation). It aims to address a gap where most nature finance and nature tech resources are published in English and not adapted to Latin American context, and includes workstreams on training, communities of practice, and a Latin America-specific nature tech taxonomy, developed in collaboration with the Nature Tech Collective.
The session's organisers noted that Latin America holds more than 40% of the world's biodiversity and more than half of the planet's tropical forest, framing the region's bioeconomy potential alongside challenges like soil degradation and land tenure issues that any financial mechanism will need to address.
Related Research
Technology and Trust in the Amazon, co-produced by Amazon Investor Coalition, Nature Tech Collective, and Climate Ventures.
