At New York Climate Week, Restor announced its new transparency tool, Restor Enterprise – supporting and enabling organizations, financial institutions, and governments on their journey to better understand their impact on nature, to map the projects and communities they are working with, and facilitate allocation of finance.
The tool will aid trust building and transparency in the nature movement, providing the ability to show how and where investments in nature are being made, contributing to closing the $700 billion annual financing gap needed for nature outlined by the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Restor announces this tool alongside the governments of Costa Rica and Ethiopia, and Salesforce, Manulife, Community Climate Solutions, UBS Optimus, WWF, The Earthshot Prize, Naia Trust, Nzatu, and Climeworks.
These leaders join the larger network of actors visible on Restor working with nature, restoration, conservation and sustainable agricultural projects covering 167 million hectares.
The Government of Costa Rica has pioneered the use of Restor by transparently showcasing the ecological impacts of its Payment for Ecosystem Services program (PES). New science suggests this program is the first national-scale evidence that the direct distribution of wealth towards local land stewards can reverse biodiversity loss at a national scale. The government of Ethiopia is now also using the tool to bring transparency to its nature programs.
Joining the movement, major organizations including Salesforce, Manulife, Community Climate Solutions and Climeworks are utilizing Restor Enterprise to map, understand and manage their nature impact and partnerships. Leveraging data layers including water dynamics, vegetative growth rate, carbon levels, biodiversity indices, forest cover change over time, and high-resolution satellite imagery, Restor is advancing transparency for its partners, users, and the broader nature movement.
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“We know that the equitable redistribution of power and wealth must be central to global environmental goals. By collaborating with the Costa Rican Government, we have been able to prove exactly that. Restor Enterprise allows us to put this knowledge into action and enable the transparent allocation of finance towards local land stewards who have the expertise to ignite large-scale restoration of conservation and biodiversity,” shared Thomas Crowther, professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. “We are incredibly excited that these leading governments, financial institutions and businesses are advancing principles of transparency whilst championing channeling finance to the local stewards of nature. We encourage others to step up and do the same.”
Restor’s platform was built with initial support from Google Creative Labs, and is powered by Google Earth Engine, combining the best-in-class technology and science to support the acceleration of the protection and restoration of ecosystems for the well-being of local people. Since 2021, with philanthropic support from the Gantner family, the Ursimone Wietlisbach Foundation, Salesforce Foundation, Coleman Family Ventures, XTX Markets and others, Restor has been building a bottom up movement by democratizing access to data and financing to support and promote the local stewards of nature across the globe.
The launch of Restor Enterprise is a watershed moment for environmental transparency and accountability. This tool gives organizations and governments the power to not only showcase their commitment to nature, but also to prove their impact in a way that’s verifiable. By enabling the transparent flow of funds to those directly stewarding our planet, we’re not just restoring ecosystems, we’re restoring trust,” Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of AI & Sustainability, Google Creative Labs.
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Restor now supports over 200,000 projects of local communities, farmers, and indigenous populations working to promote nature by connecting them to funders, markets and to one another. Restor Enterprise marks a significant step in expanding this mission to include businesses and governments, enhancing their ability to transparently demonstrate their commitment to nature restoration.
Restor Enterprise will be supporting companies with their reporting to frameworks such as those in development by the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), incorporating a groundbreaking new measurement for the state of nature for every terrestrial pixel on Earth – SEED, launching at COP16 Colombia.
“Restor envisions a world where every action positively impacts nature. To build this world, we need science and cutting-edge technology to make visible the actions of millions of local peoples and reward them for regeneratively managing the lands we all depend on. This is why we developed Restor Enterprise: to bring full transparency to the environmental movement, fostering the accountability and trust needed
