Country Digital Acceleration for Biodiversity
Session Description
Connected Conservation Foundation, marking its tenth year working with corporate and conservation partners across Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Mozambique, and Bolivia, used this session to introduce a new Digital Readiness Assessment developed with UNDP. The tool is designed to help governments and landscapes understand their digital maturity for biodiversity conservation and nature finance, and was piloted in Bolivia earlier this year. After a walkthrough of the methodology and the Bolivia results, attendees split into three groups to stress-test the framework, discussing what they liked, what concerned them, and what they'd prioritise next.
Speakers
Sophie Maxwell, Executive Director, Connected Conservation Foundation
Emma Oldham, Communications and Press Manager, Connected Conservation Foundation
Nicholas Markham, Data Science Analyst, Connected Conservation Foundation
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Connected Conservation Foundation builds "landscape-scale" digital ecosystems for conservation: IoT connectivity in protected areas, satellite monitoring, and the on-the-ground skills to act on that data, historically used for anti-poaching, human-wildlife conflict, rangeland health, and wildlife tracking, now scaled across more than fifty parks.
A recurring theme was the widening gap between the sophistication of central government tools and what actually gets used at the landscape level. Bolivia's own pilot found strong national-level earth observation capability sitting alongside almost no uptake of the same tools on the ground, and the reverse pattern for data standards, where landscape-level practice was strong but nothing was coordinated nationally.
The Digital Readiness Assessment itself scores countries and landscapes across five stages of maturity (basic through transformational) across several pillars: technical tools, digital public infrastructure, connectivity, people and skills, policy, and finance. Bolivia's pilot assessed 45 landscapes with over 60 national experts and landed at an overall "basic to opportunistic" maturity level.
A broader shift was flagged across the conservation sector: countries increasingly want their conservation and biodiversity data hosted and owned locally, rather than extracted and stored abroad, and some now require any survey work to be hosted in-country.
In breakout discussion, one recurring concern was whether a standardised, "one size fits all" assessment framework can really account for hugely different national and community contexts, and who takes responsibility for adapting it appropriately.
Another consistent theme was the disconnect between landscape-level data collection and national-level policy, and how to build a genuine two-way flow rather than data simply piling up without being acted on.
Groups raised the ongoing cost of maintaining digital infrastructure long after a project's initial funding ends, along with staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge as recurring risks to the sustainability of any digital system.
Multiple groups pushed back on scoring "enterprise-level tools" as inherently more mature than open-source ones, since several countries deliberately choose not to use external commercial systems at all. This was taken on board as direct feedback to refine the assessment.
Respecting indigenous and local community knowledge came up repeatedly, including concerns that a drive toward more efficient, tech-driven data collection could inadvertently sideline community involvement rather than complement it.
Data sovereignty and the risk of corporate or foreign control over conservation data was raised as both a concern and, potentially, a reason a public, government-owned system is preferable to closed commercial alternatives.
The session closed with a reflection from the hosts: defining "good" in this context may mean prioritising open-source, low-connectivity, low-tech solutions that work in genuinely under-resourced environments, rather than defaulting to the most advanced tools available.
