Earlier this year, our very own Paula Ehrlich delivered the keynote at Esri’s iconic Geodesign Summit. During her talk, “Reimagining How We Care for Our Planet,” she spoke about how critically important it is to connect with nature and understand everything we can about it, in order to best care for our planet.
E.O. Wilson believed that two elements are absolutely necessary in order to care for our planet:
- Discovering and understanding everything about nature
- Encouraging an exciting adventure in nature.
This ties back to the core mission of the Half-Earth Project: Engaging people in knowledge about the living world. To preserve half the earth for nature would be one of the great achievements of our lifetime—what E.O. Wilson characterized as a “moonshot goal.”
If we are to achieve that goal, and all the milestones along the way, it’s crucial that everyone has access to the most complete information possible. The Half-Earth Project’s goal is to map the geospatial location of every species on planet Earth to identify the areas that offer the best path forward for the protection of endangered species and ecosystems.
The Half-Earth Project Map is fostering engagement with information, novel tools, and local insights—the heart of geodesign—to protect global biodiversity and ensure we leave no species behind. By bringing people and information together in common cause, we’re reimagining how to do conservation and inspiring informed collective action to save the biosphere.
In this keynote, Paula shows how the Half-Earth Project Map is being integrated into conservation decision-making around the world, and how it can support the future of biodiversity conservation. This includes a walkthrough of how the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) is utilizing data from the Half-Earth Project Map in a custom dashboard, incorporating Indigenous and local community insights, to manage conservation priorities in a global center for biodiversity. You can watch the full keynote on our site.
