Biosphere Foundation secures £528,000 partnership deal with Siemens to accelerate digital transformation of natural capital sector.

The Biosphere Foundation, the non profit operational arm of the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere, has partnered up with Siemens in a three year deal to launch and globally scale the critical market infrastructure for nature based solutions to address climate change. 

The sponsorship deal, worth over £528,000, will see the biosphere benefit from technology licenses, Siemens development and management input, and global marketing support to assist in scaling and roll out. 

This partnership has boosted two infrastructure platforms in the environment and climate markets: Natural Capital Marketplace and The Smart Biosphere.  
Natural Capital Marketplace is a as an online trading platform to provide the market infrastructure to connect landowners, investors and ecosystem service customers (such as Carbon credits and Biodiversity Net Gain Credits). NCM has been developed over two years with the backing from both the HM Government and the Environment Agency. 

The Smart Biosphere provides a scalable environmental intelligence platform to monitor, report and verify nature-based interventions. It brings together IoT sensors in the environment, big data, machine learning and earth observation. 

Both solutions are built on Mendix™, Siemens' industry leading, all-in-one, low-code application development platform to create a customer portal that enables local farmers, landowners, and carbon/biodiversity credit customers to purchase offsets online. 

Rob Passmore, Commercial Lead at the Biosphere Foundation, said: “Accelerating the rollout of nature-based interventions - such as tree planting and peatland restoration - are critical to addressing the 1.5°C climate challenge.   To date, we believe the market has lacked the necessary infrastructure to redirect private investment at pace and scale into nature. The solutions we have created with Siemens directly address this challenge and represent a significant step forward for the sector.” 

A Smart Biosphere pilot project has already been trialled on a 5km river catchment in North Devon after 18 months of development with funding support from Heart of the South West LEP, South West Water and HM Government. Cutting edge technology enables data collection and analysis on the river catchment to build real-time information to find the relationships between the agricultural food system's land-use, soil health, run-off, water quality, natural flood management and flood risks.  

Alan Wardle from Siemens said “Siemens technology has significantly transformed the Biosphere Foundation by enabling us to accelerate time to market by 65% (Smart Biosphere) to 72% (NCM). Additionally, Biosphere Foundation had also benefitted from Siemens Industrial IOT Framework - MindSphere - which collects, secures and structured data from our physical environment and waters by using multiple sensors and various sources.” 

“We have had a strong partnership with Siemens over the past 3 years." Added Rob Passmore “Our alliance will only grow stronger as our two infrastructure platforms have the potential to drive real innovation and change for the rural and coastal communities, economies and environments across our nation.” 

What is next for the Biosphere Foundation? “In a word scaling! We are thrilled to have signed a strategic partnership with Siemens who supports our vision and ambition. Our focus now is on ramping up impacts by rolling out our nature-based solution infrastructure to new geographies.”   
​
Rob Passmore is a panellist today at Transform2022 on July 13 sharing the Biosphere Foundation’s experience in digital transformation on the main stage in the What’s next in tech? session.