How Biodiversity Can Fortify Humanity
We release our annual report, celebrate CXL's 9th birthday, and travel to Peru to deploy a new Sentinel constellation - our first in the Amazon.
A Letter from Our Founders
🦾 When AI meets Human Ingenuity
We recently celebrated CXL’s 9th birthday, which gave us a moment to pause and reflect on how far we have come as an organization in nine years. Last Friday, we shared this quote from Alex’s 2015 letter to the original CXL team:
“I want us to be defined by a set of characteristics: We should think big, REALLY BIG, we should be nimble, we should be collaborative and transparent, we should admit and learn from failure, we should be pushing for revolutionary ideas, not just evolutionary ones, we should focus on solving problems, not just making progress, we should work across disciplines and sectors, we should harness the power of the crowds, and we should embrace technology, science, and data, as well as art, media, and finance. Finally, we should be fun, kind to each other, and the world. We should be undaunted by our own fears.”
We are immensely proud that every single one of these principles holds true for CXL to this day. We think big work across sectors and across the globe empower innovators everywhere, and we remain undaunted in every sense. This has been especially evident in 2024 with our announcement of our Big Bets—audacious but achievable 5-year goals aimed at making huge strides toward our mission of preventing the sixth mass extinction.
CXL’s ambitious Big Bets are:
Catalyze sustainable, nature-positive economies
Advance planetary health
Scale protection of wildlife and wildlands
Today, we want to discuss our second Big Bet: Advancing Planetary Health. With this goal, we aim to address the intertwined degradation of ecosystems and human health, including the underlying drivers of pathogen emergence and pandemics. Although many view conservation and human health efforts as unrelated, we know they are deeply interconnected. Recognizing this connection enables us to make unprecedented progress in improving both human health and the health of our planet as well as its non-human inhabitants.
Recent events have underscored the critical importance of our work. The current strain of H5N1 bird flu, which originated in 1996 in farmed geese in China, has spread globally, affecting hundreds of millions of wild and domestic birds. The disease has a 100% fatality rate for birds and has recently infected mammals, including dairy cattle in the U.S. and seals and sea lions in South America — killing almost every single seal pup. Since 2003, there have been 868 reported cases in humans, with a fatality rate of 53%. The virus has also been detected in municipal wastewater across the United States, revealing its wide reach and the need for comprehensive monitoring and response strategies for “zoonotic” diseases.
In April, I (Paul) traveled to Singapore for the Planetary Health Annual Summit, where I had the opportunity to speak on the panel, “Breaking the Silos - Systems Change for Planetary Health,” alongside other leaders working to solve the biggest planetary health problems. During the panel, I discussed the transformative potential of AI to drive better problem identification and solutions in the conservation and biodiversity spaces—by harnessing global connectivity and collaboration.
At CXL, we prioritize Open Innovation, which enables us to gather environmental problems and opportunities from people across the globe who are facing these problems themselves. Humans are the only ones who can identify the problems most personal to them—and when they do this, we can deploy AI’s rapid-processing and complex informational capacities to accelerate solutions to our planet’s most pressing challenges.
This “Collective Intelligence” supercharges global problem-solving by harnessing both artificial intelligence and human ingenuity. By leveraging mechanisms such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, design thinking, and open innovation, we can empower new solvers from diverse backgrounds to contribute to planetary health solutions.
This quarter, we want to highlight CXL’s work at home and across the globe to propel our second “Big Bet.” As we work to “Advance Planetary Health,” we remain committed to you, our global community of innovators and problem-solvers. You are the fuel of our “Collective Intelligence” movement that can save the planet.
Thank you for your support and, as always, we urge you to…
Dare Mighty Things,
Paul Bunje and Alex Dehgan
From the CXL Home Office
🌎 Annual Report Chronicles a Year of Dynamic Conservation Solutions
In Q2, we released our 2023 Annual Report, which details our work and results throughout last year. We are excited to share it again here, in case you missed it! Read for a deep dive into our 2023 growth, our tech and innovation highlights, our incredible community of partners and innovators, and our press features.
🔥 The Fire Grand Challenge Launches this Summer
We are excited to share that our Fire Grand Challenge will launch this summer! The Challenge seeks brilliant ideas from anyone, anywhere, to transform how we manage and live with fire, and ultimately to restore fire to its appropriate place in natural and social dynamics. By braiding together traditional and rural knowledge and cutting-edge technology and innovation, winning solutions will address the challenges of changing fire regimes while advancing positive, measurable outcomes for biodiversity, ecosystem health, and community well-being. With the support of the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, ESRI, Planet, and USAID, our first Fire Grand Challenge will focus on Western North America. In addition, the Challenge topics have been revised and consolidated to the following two:
1. Scaling Innovative Ecosystem Stewardship - This challenge theme seeks innovations that incentivize and scale economically-driven, locally-appropriate land and fire stewardship throughout the fire cycle, while protecting biodiversity and promoting healthy ecosystems.
2. Synthesizing Diverse Knowledge Bases - This challenge theme seeks solutions that promote transparency and bring together diverse sources of knowledge or data to ensure that relevant, timely, actionable information is accessible to all relevant responders throughout the fire cycle.
We are still seeking funders and partners to help us make this challenge a success and invite you to reach out to us if you are interested in partnering.
🔬 Meta-Analysis Confirms the Interconnectedness of Environmental Degradation and Human Health, Supporting NABIT’s Integrated Solution
Human-driven activities like illegal wildlife trafficking, encroachment into wild spaces, and unchecked expansion of agricultural lands have blurred the lines between ecosystems. Diseases can now leap across species, exacerbating environmental degradation and global disease prevalence. A meta-analysis published in May’s Nature journal reveals biodiversity loss is the greatest planetary driver of infectious disease in humans, confirming our conviction that the challenges of environmental degradation and infectious disease outbreak must be addressed in tandem.
We continue to develop the NABIT to be the premiere tool for addressing the interconnectedness of biodiversity and planetary health. Its ability to determine the presence of any species with an available genetic sequence enables the detection and containment of disease, and the safeguarding of food, before those diseases “jump” to humans. The NABIT team is currently developing Mpox and Swinepox assays that will deploy to the field this fall, with a focus on monitoring production swine and rodents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is positioned to deliver incredible impact. If you are interested in developing assays for the NABIT, or if you are working in the field and could benefit from this technology, please reach out to our team.
📰 WildMe User Community Grows Globally, Sparking Feature in National Wildlife Magazine
A National Wildlife Magazine article in March highlighted how WildMe is enabling conservation on a larger scale by supporting the marking of individual animals. Our community has marked a massive 215,000 individual animals from 170 species since July 2023! Additionally, the article cited that “WildMe users have shared behavioral data on 15,500 whale sharks to-date, gleaning insights on the animals’ migration corridors and histories, which can protect whale sharks from entrapment in nets, pollution, and human hunting.” Ecology and the Journal of Fish Biology have also published insights on animal behavior from WildMe, which has enabled over 1900 conservationists, journalists, and researchers globally to engage in collaborative and linked conservation efforts. We continue to be astonished at Wild Me’s contributions to our field!
♻️ CXL Attends Circularity 24, Propels our Innovation toward a Textile-to-Textile Future
Textile-to-textile recycling companies have exploded in recent years to address the growing challenge of global textile waste. Devin Nieusma, a pioneer of CXL’s Textile Circularity Challenge, joined innovators and thought leaders at Circularity 24 in May to explore the technical practicalities of transforming textiles into high-quality new materials, and innovative breakthroughs that can scale the textile-to-textile recycling supply chain via Open Innovation and
Leading the panel, “Scaling Collection and Logistics Through Open Innovation,” Devin joined senior leaders from both Goodwill and Syre to explore what it will take in terms of policy, consumer demand, and technological shifts to foster a circular textile-to-textile recycled economy—for example, to transfer massive amounts of waste from Goodwill Phoenix to a firm like Syre. We continue to fundraise for and to build a community of leaders and innovators around our Textile Circularity Challenge, which will build on relationships and knowledge from our 2021-2022 Microfiber Innovation Challenge to transform the linear textile supply chain in favor of sustainability.
🚀 CXL’s Expanding Team Gathers in DC to Map out the Future
In late May, our global team from across three continents converged in Washington, D.C. for our annual strategic onsite. This team gathering was particularly special as it was the first time we brought together Open Innovation alumni who are making an impact in the field and partners with whom we're currently co-creating new initiatives. We also hosted a visioning exercise, where we collectively mapped out the highest impact initiatives for the near future. As always, we can’t wait to turn these visionary ideas into reality!
🤝 Strengthening Partnerships in the Amazon Region, at FEST
Alex spent more time this quarter meeting with colleagues, leaders, and conservationists in the Amazon region, to strengthen the partnerships and local ties that will ensure the positive impact of CXL’s initiatives in the region. In June, he traveled to Lima to serve as a keynote speaker at FEST, an invitation-only event hosted by Intercorp, Peru's largest corporate conglomerate and a major player in the banking, retail, health and education industries. Inspired by FEST’s focus on human and technological innovation, and in accordance with the conference theme - “Super Humans” - Alex spoke on CXL’s mission, work, and use of artificial intelligence and technology to drive innovation in conservation.
🐅 Photo feature: Sentinel Constellation Deployed in Peruvian Amazon
CXL’s Head of Product Henrik Cox and Lead AI Researcher Dante Wasmuht journeyed to Madre Dios, Peru in April to deploy a constellation of AI-powered Sentinel devices – for the first time in the Amazon rainforest.
The duo was joined by Arianna Basto, Mammal Program Manager at Climate Corridors and lead for bolstering the region’s biodiversity monitoring efforts. In the region, Sentinel aims to accelerate analysis of the impact of illegal gold mining - specifically the depletion of the natural salt that primates and herbivorous animals depend on for survival. Sentinel will monitor and analyze thousands of hectares of territory in Madre Dios, identifying changing animal behavior, drivers of endangerment, and opportunities to prevent poaching at its source. By enabling the monitoring and analysis of thousands of recorded photos of wildlife and information on an accelerated timeframe, Sentinel serves as a powerful tool of protection and conservation for local rangers.
⛏️ Spotlight on the Field: Pedro Gasparinetti, Conservation Strategy Fund
Pedro Gasparinetti is a Brazilian economist with a passion for contributing to societal well-being through thoughtful public policy and development. Throughout his career, he has focused on simplifying complex ideas in order to assess costs and benefits across various economic sectors and policy areas. Pedro and his team were selected as finalists of CXL’s Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge, which ran between 2021-2022, for their development of their tool the Mining Impact Calculator.
Pedro and his team at the Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) initially developed the Mining Impact Calculator to enable the Brazilian market to assess the socio-environmental damages caused by illegal mining. CSF developed the tool in collaboration with the Federal Public Ministry of Brazil (MPF) to calculate the “hidden” costs of illegal gold mining, providing crucial data on the impact of mining on the environment and South American communities. CXL’s Challenge enabled Pedro and his team to expand the Calculator into the Ecuadorian market and, since then, into Colombia, Peru, Guyana, Suriname and other South American nations. CSF’s Calculator has attracted USAID funding and spurred the World Bank to begin deliberating on choosing a common metric to measure the impacts of mining in the Amazon.
Most recently, the Calculator has collaborated with the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) to document deforestation, sedimentation, and mercury contamination in buffer zones of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in Peru. Data from early 2022 to August 2023 revealed socio-environmental losses of US$593 million in the region as a result of mining, impacting the well-being of three indigenous communities.
The Calculator’s growing usage internationally and collaborations with projects like MAAP are enabling humanity to identify and combat sources of environmental degradation that harm both wildlife and indigenous communities. Gasparinetti and his team’s impact are a powerful testimonial to CXL’s ability to catalyze innovations that halt environmental degradation.