T.C. Haas
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
United States
Keywords: biodiversity conservation, sustainable business models, socio-ecological systems, agent-based modeling, rhinoceros poaching
Summary:
Business is both the main driver of the planet’s current catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the key to stemming it. To address this challenge, a business strategy is developed wherein firms launch profitable business lines, called biodiversity offerings that harness market forces to fund projects that result in the enhancement of biodiversity. This strategy introduces a new procedure for minimizing the costs of such projects while maximizing their positive impacts on biodiversity. The gulf between customer interactions with such offerings and the conservation of a particular species is bridged with technology. First, technological tools are developed to build a profitable and biodiversity-enhancing offering via new stochastic, agent-based models of business networks that span consumer countries and those countries that host the man_xFFFE_aged species. These models are coupled to a stochastic, individual-based model of the managed species and are optimized for profitability through the use of new optimization algorithms that run on high performance computers. Then, customer loyalty to the offering is maintained through a new technology called a biodiversity dashboard. These web-based dashboards display in real-time, monitoring data on the offering’s impact on a managed species. Biodiversity-concerned customers viewing this dashboard see for themselves how the offering is positively impacting that species. By maintaining biodiversity dashboards attached to biodiversity offerings, firms give these customers a way to assess what effects their individual purchases are having on biodiversity. Such detailed, real-time feedback of how the purchase of an offering affects biodiversity addresses the sense of powerlessness that many biodiversity-concerned customers experience when deciding to purchase an environmentally sustainable offering. Biodiversity offerings are built by first, understanding the political context of a particular biodiversity threat, second, designing a profitable product or service that is tied to a minimum-cost project that enhances biodiversity, and third, displaying the current and future impact of the project on the project’s biodiversity dashboard. The political context is comprehended by first, applying new stream-parsing algorithms to social media commentary on the targeted political-ecological system; and then second, using this data to fit a set of interacting agent- and individual-based models of that system. New statistical algorithms that run on cluster computers are employed to handle the massive computational challenge entailed by the fitting of such highly parameterized models. The biodiversity dashboard is fed with real-time data on species abundance using new remote-sensing technologies. As an example, this tool is applied to the conservation of rhinoceroses in South Africa. Specifically, a set of agent-based models are programmed to dynamically model several firms interacting with each other to form a business network that employs would-be poachers to manufacture furniture in Johannesburg that is exported to the developed world. Such employment reduces the inclination of these workers to poach rhinos. Reducing rhino poaching needs to happen immediately because South Africa hosts the last viable meta-population of rhinos in the world. Output from these interacting models is shown and the general purpose tool used to build them is described.