Atos and WWF partner up to support biodiversity
IT consulting firm Atos has announced a new strategic partnership with WWF. The firm will now work to help the global charity harness technology to support biodiversity conservation and business decarbonisation.
The World Wide Fund for Nature is a Swiss-headquartered international non-governmental organisation. Founded in 1961, it has spent more than 60 years working in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. This places it at the forefront of the human world’s battle to preserve biodiversity.
Roughly defined, ‘biodiversity’ is a measure for the different kinds of life found in a particular area. It can include the variety of animal life, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria, each of which operates in a delicate balance that supports the future continuation of life in a particular habitat or environment. As such, biodiversity supports everything in nature that human life also needs to survive, from food to clean water, medicine – with many of the treatments now taken for granted derived from natural materials – and shelter.
As the WWF looks to use all the tools at its disposal to champion biodiversity, its has announced a three-year strategic partnership with Atos. The consulting firm will work to leverage technology to support biodiversity and decarbonisation across three priority areas essential to effectively tackle the current biodiversity crisis: business transformation, financing and influence.
Kirsten Schuijt, director general for the WWF, commented, “The devastating impacts of climate change and nature loss are felt everywhere. This dual crisis requires urgent, innovative and scalable solutions. Technology, if channeled in the right way, has the enormous potential to help address some of the pressing challenges we face today. We're excited about this new partnership with Atos as it will enable us to collaborate on advancing much-needed technological tools to support our efforts to stop and reverse nature loss at a policy level and in the field.”
Atos and the WWF have defined a trio of project variants, by which conservation organisations and other stakeholders could benefit from the partnership. The firm is automating biodiversity surveillance, to monitor important ecosystems – with a first pilot currently being developed to analyse grasslands and savannahs in East Africa; predicting and preventing epidemic risk, searching for zoonoses -diseases that jump between species, including humans – with a pilot is being developed to analyse data available in the Mekong basin; and improving tech tools like an existing solution known as SMART - a Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool – which is already used by 50,000 agents in 80 countries to support wildlife and ecosystem conservation.
Nourdine Bihmane, deputy CEO Atos and CEO of Tech Foundations, added, “We are excited to announce this strategic partnership with WWF which is in line with our respective ambitions and expertise. Atos has been committed for over 12 years to decarbonize its own operations as well as accompany its customers in their own efforts. I am extremely proud that our technological expertise is being put to work to accelerate decarbonization strategies and support WWF's conservation practices and biodiversity projects worldwide.”
The move comes at an important moment in the road to a carbon-neutral world. Recent research from Capgemini found that despite talking a good game on climate change and sustainability, almost four-in-ten businesses do not believe biodiversity is important to the future of their firms. Meanwhile, less than a quarter of executives say their firm has a biodiversity strategy – in spite of the grave impacts the loss of biodiversity will have on preventing the heating of the planet.
