Over the past decade, companies have become increasingly aware that the climate transition alone will not be enough to safeguard their long term resilience. The next frontier is nature. Yet moving from intention to concrete, measurable outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystems remains one of the most complex tasks in sustainability. Part of this complexity stems from the very object we are trying to protect: nature is dynamic, place-based, interdependent, and context specific. Another part comes from the tools we have historically used to measure it: fragmented, inconsistent, and often heavily dependent on expert judgment.
Nature Tech is emerging in this gap. It brings together technologies that make it possible to understand ecosystems with scientific rigor, quantify pressures and outcomes, and deploy targeted solutions at scale. It is not a single category or industry. It is a system of capabilities that enable, accelerate, and scale the transition toward a nature positive economy.
Why the rise of Nature Tech matters now
The scientific and policy context sets the stage. Six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed. More than half of global GDP is exposed to nature related risks. Meanwhile, the Global Biodiversity Framework signals a profound shift: from isolated conservation projects to systemic action embedded in finance, supply chains, and corporate strategy.
But the ambitions of policy and the urgency of ecological decline collide with the reality that most organisations do not yet have the data, methods, or tools to act with confidence. They lack a way to answer the basic questions that should guide any intervention:
- What is the current state of nature in the places where we operate
- What pressures are we contributing to
- What outcomes can be measured, monitored, and verified
- What technologies exist that can help
Nature Tech is the enabling infrastructure that responds to these questions.
A shared language for an emerging ecosystem
Because Nature Tech is expanding rapidly, the sector has been difficult to navigate, even for experts. That is what motivated the development of the Nature Tech Taxonomy Framework by the Nature Tech Collective and Impact Labs. Instead of treating Nature Tech as a loose collection of tools, the taxonomy organises the ecosystem through three complementary lenses: transition, nature, and technology.
1. The Transition Lens
Rooted in the One Earth Solutions Framework, it structures the real world transformations required for a nature positive future: conservation and restoration, regenerative agriculture, nature positive economies, and nature positive finance. These transitions anchor technology in its purpose. They help organisations articulate what they need the technology to do: restore a degraded ecosystem, reduce agricultural pressure on soils, identify new levers for biodiversity finance, or monitor outcomes at landscape level.
2. The Nature Lens
The nature lens is still under active development, reflecting the complexity of Earth systems. It integrates bioregions, biomes, ecosystem services, and the planetary boundaries framework. Its purpose is to make Nature Tech context aligned: the right tool for the right challenge, in the right ecosystem, at the right spatial scale.
3. The Tech Lens
This is where the landscape becomes tangible. The taxonomy structures technologies into five families:
Market Pressures
Tools that align incentives, disclosure requirements, reporting standards, verification platforms, and regulatory mechanisms.
Measurement and Monitoring
Sensors, eDNA, bioacoustics, remote sensing, IoT networks, Earth observation, LiDAR, hyperspectral imaging.
Modeling
AI, digital twins, risk modeling, GIS, analytics engines, LCA based methods, species level forecasting of ecological outcomes.
Material Change
Biotechnology, regenerative agriculture tools, nature based infrastructure, water systems, biodegradable materials, green chemistry innovations.
Monetization
Natural capital accounting, ecosystem valuation, nature credits, fintech solutions, distributed ledgers for transactions.
This structure makes the landscape intelligible. It helps move beyond the common misconception that Nature Tech is simply biodiversity monitoring. In reality, it spans everything from real time measurement to nature based engineering, from behavioral tools to financial instruments capable of transforming markets.
Case example of Nature Tech in practice: Ubees
To illustrate the diversity and potential of Nature Tech, take the example of Ubees, a company that operates at the intersection of precision ecology, agriculture, and digital monitoring. Their model combines bees equipped with micro sensors, hive telemetry, geolocation, and environmental data streams to monitor pollinator health and ecosystem conditions at scale.
Ubees’ value does not lie only in the sensors. It lies in the integration of biological indicators and digital infrastructure:
- Bees act as natural samplers of landscapes
- Sensors and hive monitoring detect stressors in real time
- Data models infer patterns of pesticide exposure, floral resource availability, and environmental risks
- Insights are used to improve agricultural practices, reduce losses, and characterise ecosystem status
This positions Ubees within multiple segments of the taxonomy simultaneously:
- Measurement & Monitoring (bioindicators, sensor networks)
- Modeling (data fusion, ecological inference, early warning systems)
- Market Pressures (evidence for certification schemes, compliance, supply chain visibility)
- Material Change (improved agroecological practices enabled by data driven insights)
Crucially, Ubees demonstrates how Nature Tech can produce actionable intelligence for both biodiversity and business outcomes: crop productivity, ecosystem health, pollinator resilience, and reduced chemical dependency.
The frontier: from data to decisions to real world impact
Nature Tech holds enormous promise, but technology alone does not solve the underlying problem. The challenge is not only to develop more sensors, more models, or more dashboards. The challenge is to build a coherent system where:
- high quality data
- robust frameworks
- credible metrics
- and science based methods
feed into decisions that shift capital, reshape practices, and regenerate ecosystems.
This is why frameworks like the Nature Tech Taxonomy matter. They provide structure and legibility to a landscape that is expanding faster than most organisations can follow. They help avoid two common pitfalls: the techno solutionism that assumes technology by itself is the answer, and the paralysis that emerges when nature is treated as too complex to act upon.
Nature Tech is ultimately not about tools. It is about the capacity to understand, protect, and restore the systems on which all economies depend.
A new architecture for nature positive transformation
The emergence of Nature Tech marks a turning point. It signals a transition from fragmented initiatives to scalable, data driven strategies capable of supporting a global biodiversity recovery agenda.
Its significance extends across sectors:
- For companies, it enables credible measurement and real integration of nature into core strategy.
- For investors, it provides the metrics, transparency, and monitoring needed for nature positive finance.
- For governments, it unlocks evidence based policy, regional planning, and enforcement.
- For communities and ecosystems, it accelerates the shift from extractive to regenerative models.
The next decade will be decisive. Nature Tech can become the backbone of a new economic architecture, one where decisions are grounded in science, aligned with planetary boundaries, and capable of generating both resilience and regeneration.
But harnessing this potential requires deliberate choices: selecting the right tools, contextualising them in ecosystems, and designing interventions that create real ecological outcomes. When these conditions align, Nature Tech becomes not just an innovation category, but a catalyst for a thriving and resilient future.
Sources
Goren, Gilad. Introducing the Nature Tech Taxonomy Framework. Nature Tech Collective (2024).
