Nature’s DNA Detectives

Fish populations in the river have been declining, so ecologists from the UK Environment Agency are here on a dank July day to take stock of the population. To do this, they run an electric current through the water to stun the fish so they can collect and count them before throwing them back. Rozy Gray and Simon Hunter are here, too, from the nonprofit Bristol Avon Rivers Trust, or BART. Clad in rubber boots, gloves and a raincoat, Gray, 28, wields a syringe instead of a fish taser. Her work resembles that of a forensic crime scene investigator.

For about a half-hour, she sucks up water samples and injects them through a small filter, part of a £300 ($367) lab kit sold by a UK company called NatureMetrics Ltd. She seals the samples and packs them in a specimen bag for shipment to a lab 100 miles away.

Spotty data have made it hard to develop a recovery plan for the Frome’s fish. But the river is a test site for a new way to measure biodiversity. The local fish might appreciate that it doesn’t involve electric shocks.

What Gray is after with her syringe and filter is environmental DNA, or eDNA. Animals leave traces of themselves virtually everywhere they go, all of which contain DNA. Much as law enforcement agencies use DNA fingerprinting to link crimes to potential suspects, researchers can use eDNA to tie animal species—elephants or weasels or grasshoppers—to the ecosystems through which they’ve recently passed. It can also offer crucial information about, for example, the arrival of an invasive species in an area, or even the presence of a species thought to be extinct.

“EDNA has been a really insightful tool,” says Hunter, BART’s chief executive officer. “It gives us this really good snapshot of what fish data is like today.”

The approach works at larger scales as well. The government of Abu Dhabi published a comprehensive fishery survey in 2019. The work took two years, including 250 days on the water, says Razan Al Mubarak, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and UN climate change high-level champion for the COP28 summit. But thanks to new DNA testing equipment, “the next survey will be done”—she snaps her fingers—“immediately.”

The term “biodiversity,” short for “biological diversity,” describes the variety of living species in a place. All signs point to it being in free fall worldwide. Animal populations on Earth have declined 70% since 1970, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London. A landmark 2015 study concluded that species are disappearing at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than they otherwise might without human dominance of the biosphere. Some scientists argue that this acceleration amounts to the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history.

This development is a worry not only for scientists and nature lovers. The global economy depends on complex webs of life that keep water clean and soil healthy and that stop invasive species from decimating the plants and animals we eat and the forests we harvest for wood. The World Bank estimates that the toll of biodiversity loss on the world’s gross domestic product may reach $2.7 trillion a year by 2030 if key ecosystems start to collapse.

In December 2022 at a United Nations summit in Montreal, officials from almost 200 countries agreed to set aside 30% of the Earth’s land and ocean for conservation by the end of this decade. The new pact asks major companies and financial institutions to monitor and disclose their biodiversity-related risks.

Corporations and banks have started to grapple with their responsibility—and the economic imperative—to try to stanch the loss. Salesforce Inc. in April announced plans to become “nature positive.” Cement maker Holcim AG pledged to have “a measurable positive impact” on biodiversity by 2030. Cosmetics giant L’Oréal SA has set several biodiversity-related targets, including using no more land to source ingredients in 2030 than it did in 2019. Bonds tied to biodiversity goals raised $165 billion globally through August, 77% more than in the same period last year.

Tracking progress toward these new targets requires gathering and analyzing new kinds of data. Environmental services company Stantec, genomics company Illumina, and such startups as SimplexDNA, eDNAtec and NatureMetrics are eager to help. They’re part of a nascent “nature tech” sector that PwC LLC estimates reached $2 billion in value in 2022, after doubling every year since 2018.

Easy to use, highly sensitive and low-cost, eDNA technology has found early adopters in industries that are often scrutinized for their footprints on land and water: agriculture, forestry, land development and mining. Nestlé SA and Brazilian miner Vale SA are experimenting with it. EDF Renewables Inc. is participating in a research project to explore its use at sea.

Time is short to find and scale new nature-detecting technologies if the world is to slow the destruction of wildlife. “Making [biodiversity data] ready for prime time is a really critically important thing for us to do, wall to wall, across the globe, in all ecosystems,” says Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at the WWF.

Yet biodiversity has no single metric as essential as the one at the heart of climate change: the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Every ton of CO2 is the same; each square foot of nature is different. Fitting that astounding diversity into a spreadsheet so financial markets can digest it and companies can track their footprints is a daunting task. And it’s not clear just what companies will do with the wealth of information that eDNA provides, in the absence of strict regulation. Does it simply make obfuscation and greenwashing easier?

That possibility casts a fearful light on the technology, even as it succeeds in quantifying biological life. “If you’re not actually regulated to reduce or minimize your impacts,” warns Megan Evans, senior lecturer in public sector management at the University of New South Wales in Australia, “you could make a claim around ‘net positive’ or ‘nature positive’ without really changing anything.”

For Frédéric Hache, executive director of the Green Finance Observatory in Brussels and lecturer in sustainable finance at Sciences Po university in Paris, the increasing use by companies of tools such as eDNA is concerning. “This is a very problematic reframing of conservation policies. Conservation is not a corporation’s role, it’s government’s role,” he says. “This is being promoted in order to claim that this is an alternative to government regulation—‘Look, we’re doing this, there’s no need to regulate us.’ We’ve heard this story before.”

Eventually, scientists such as Bruce who were studying bigger organisms realized they could use the same approach. Instead of spending weeks examining insects under a microscope, researchers could “just stick them in a food processor and blend them into a soup, and then sequence the DNA in the soup,” in the words of Bruce, 38. “And actually, we can sequence 100 soups at once.” The DNA can then be matched against genomic libraries for a detailed picture of all the insect (or other) life in a given locale.

Bruce realized that eDNA could be powerful in the fight against biodiversity loss. But she worried it would remain confined to campus laboratories with few real-world applications. So she founded NatureMetrics in 2014. The first thing she did was to design a simple water filter that anyone could use; it captures eDNA and locks it away in a contamination-free compartment.

At first it was unclear whether there was any business to be had, Bruce recalls. “When I first raised funding from angel investors, basically the main thing I was asked was: ‘Who’s going to be prepared to pay money to know about nature?’” But investors saw potential, and clients materialized. By 2020, NatureMetrics had an office in Guildford, England, 20 employees and $2.5 million in seed capital. The company needed a business leader.

Katie Critchlow had spent years at UK-based retailer Marks & Spencer Plc trying to make its supply chain more sustainable. Along the way, she helped develop the company’s net-zero and zero-waste policies and other environmental initiatives.

“I was in charge of telling our suppliers and our supply chains what standards we wanted” for biodiversity, she says. “But you couldn’t monitor it. You couldn’t measure it at scale, and so you couldn’t manage it.” She says she felt the same frustration later in her career, working for the WWF in Borneo: “Even organizations dedicated to biodiversity didn’t really have measures.”

Critchlow, now 42, joined NatureMetrics’ board in 2018, and two years later she became CEO. The company bought part of a Canadian nature-monitoring business to get a foothold in North America. It has raised a total of about $37 million, employs 140 people and says it now has 500 clients across more than 100 countries. (Critchlow stepped down from her post in September, and NatureMetrics hasn’t yet named a new, permanent CEO.)

This model clinched backing for NatureMetrics from the BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund, which has invested €150 million ($158 million) across three startups. “You’re actually enabling the client to follow its impact over the years, gather data on all its sites on the platform and then be able to have a proper, accurate view of the corporate’s impact on biodiversity,” says Olivier Warnan, a partner of the fund and a NatureMetrics board observer.

BNP Paribas doesn’t buy NatureMetrics data itself, but Warnan says it could be critical for companies hoping to get financing for a project such as a mine or ESG-labeled debt.

Mining giant Anglo American Plc, a NatureMetrics client, plans to roll out eDNA testing on water, sediment and soil across all its mine sites. The company can analyze eDNA gathered at proposed locations for new projects to assess the risk to wildlife. It can also use eDNA from sites that are already operational to gauge impacts.

Through trial runs of eDNA collection, Anglo American amassed “an incredible amount of information from a variety of sites and operations” with speed and ease, says Warwick Mostert, Anglo’s biodiversity principal. At the company’s Woodsmith fertilizer mine in Yorkshire, England, for instance, testing led to the discovery of a species thought to be locally extinct: the harvest mouse.

Mostert says the Woodsmith team is using evidence of the mouse’s presence to inform how they manage the land, such as by adjusting planned vegetation around a wetland area on the site and helping to boost grassland growth. Mowing and hedgerow trimming—threats to the harvest mouse—have been suspended. To compensate for the hectares unearthed for the mine, the company is funding a tree planting project on the North York moors.

Anglo American combines eDNA with other techniques such as spatial and satellite imaging, remote sensing and on-site assessments to help the company take more accurate measurements and set a baseline. “The more we can use models and predictive monitoring and can look at the best available biodiversity data, the better we are in terms of managing our impact,” Mostert says. “The beauty of eDNA is that it shows a footprint, like a fingerprint trace, to say the species was there.”

All that data will be used to assess the company’s progress against its target to leave the natural richness of sites in a better state than when it arrived—in other words, to have a “net positive impact” by 2030, Anglo American says.

It’s the kind of goal that irks policy experts who call out companies for failing to show precisely how they will get there—particularly when their business model is overturning swaths of land. Without specific and transparent benchmarks to measure progress against, the actual impact is unclear, says Evans of the University of New South Wales. “Net positive” targets can lead to schemes that effectively swap a species lost or displaced by operations for new habitat or different species elsewhere, she notes.

“Technology can be used in good ways or not-so-good ways,” Evans says. “Where we can exchange some species for others, there’s risks associated with these new tools.”

For companies, one challenge is setting goals in an area normally far outside their expertise. The London-based Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, led by financial and corporate executives, issued new guidelines in September for business to address nature-related risks. The nonprofit sector and scientific community have also stepped in to help.

A decade ago, several nonprofits banded together to help large companies become more effective in their efforts to fight climate change. The Science Based Targets initiative has since become a gold standard for ensuring that corporate climate goals are in line with the best scientific guidance. Verification through the initiative is also a way to gird against greenwashing.

The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), a sibling group, now works with companies eager to complement their climate goals with biodiversity protection. The organization relies in part on complex research on “planetary boundaries”—that is, how much abuse the Earth’s systems can take from humankind before breaking. The SBTN takes those estimates and translates them into limits for individual companies.

A new SBTN-supported biodiversity framework is currently being tested by 17 companies, including GSK, H&M Group and Nestlé. More than 115 companies contributed to its design.

Erin Billman is executive director of the network. She says eDNA is no silver bullet; it’s a tool to help companies develop their biodiversity strategies. There should be “a single point of direction for companies in terms of: What does ‘enough’ look like?” she says. “What’s the right level of ambition?”

Measurement tools such as eDNA allow companies to create a current picture of the state of nature and then, in theory, measure and manage change against that. Improvements that can be quantified can be packaged into tradeable units known as biodiversity credits, or biocredits—akin to better-known and much-criticized carbon offsets. These can then be stuffed into contracts that are tradeable on exchanges, or even into new green funds paying dividends in cash or via the credits themselves. Or they can be sold directly to other companies or individuals.

There are already laws or policies for offsetting biodiversity loss in countries including Australia, Colombia and France. In England, to get planning permission, homebuilders and infrastructure developers will soon be required to compensate for their expected harm to biodiversity by 110%. They can do this by buying biodiversity credits generated by landowners elsewhere in the country who have improved their practices and consequently boosted local wildlife. Tools such as eDNA can be used to measure biodiversity levels against a government-devised metric, which in turn underpins the tradeable credit.

The biocredits market remains nascent. Proponents are being cautious to avoid the traps of the carbon market, which has been stymied by junk credits, fraudulent claims and exploitative business models.

A big hurdle is that unlike with carbon, there’s no single unit and no one global “budget.” “You can swap tons of CO2 all around the world, but when it comes to nature, a mangrove in Latin America would be different from a mangrove in Africa, so the commodification process is much harder,” says Joe Huddart, ecologist and business development manager at NatureMetrics, which doesn’t itself generate or trade credits.

Plus, financial institutions are struggling to build investment strategies based on biodiversity data because of the sheer volume. Investors can use the data to assess risks or impacts associated with companies they’re already watching, says Eric Pedersen, head of responsible investments at Nordea Asset Management. But starting out with that amount of information could be too unwieldy.

Efforts to codify the living world in ever-increasing levels of detail could be quixotic, Pedersen says, particularly in the absence of regulation. Investors should stand back and look at the bigger picture, he advises, while regulators globally need to act faster to force their hand.

Yet eDNA may also offer an advantage over the addition and subtraction of tons of carbon. It does something many other forms of environmental monitoring can’t: It cuts through abstract diplomatic and scientific language and shows people what’s living unseen and previously undetected all around them. People instinctively love nature, whereas they struggle to conceptualize invisible emissions of gas.

In September the results from the testing of the Frome water came in: It picked up 11 different fish species, including the critically endangered European eel. On the banks of the river back in July, as he watched his colleague Gray collect samples, Hunter of the Bristol Avon Rivers Trust expressed cautious optimism about the potential of eDNA data to underpin biodiversity credits. A fledgling biocredits market exists for English land but not yet for the country’s waterways. The trust, along with fund manager Federated Hermes Inc., has received government funding to explore its potential.

“It offers opportunity, but it also offers risk,” Hunter says. “It’s got to be right from Day 1, and it’s got to have that really strong regulation behind it.”