TerraBio's First Results Show Impact on Biodiversity in ABF’s Businesses

October/November, 2024 - Results from TerraBio’s first two monitoring cycles show a mixed impact on biodiversity from the projects that received funding from the Amazon Biodiversity Fund (ABF). The ABF is a private fund, advised by Impact Earth, whose purpose is to invest in projects and companies with a social and environmental impact in the Legal Amazon (find out more here). For example, despite only being in the very early stages, some results show an increase in similarity in insect communities and increased carbon capture by vegetation in those areas that are being restored. By 2023, around 5,000 hectares had been monitored.

Developed by Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT, Spatial Informatics Groups (SIG) and USAID, TerraBio is a tool that combines cutting-edge geospatial data analysis technologies with environmental DNA  to evaluate various land usage and investment models in terms of their relative impacts on biodiversity. It consists of a monitoring, reporting and verification approach to generate evidence on environmental impacts of the sustainable business operations of the companies financed by ABF.

This methodology has been used to evaluate four projects, all different in terms of products, geographies and activities. They are Horta da Terra (a company that produces non-conventional food plants from the Amazon in a regenerative-syntropic system), Café Apuí (Amazônia Agroflorestal , which engages farmers in the recovery of degraded areas through agroforestry systems, with a focus on coffee), Inocas (a company that plants macaúba in an agroforestry system as an alternative source of vegetable oil) and AgroVerde/ReforesTerra (working on the reforestation of 2,000 hectares of permanent protection areas on small farms in Rondônia).

The Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT team is concluding the third cycle of collecting and analyzing the Terrabio data. The reports for the first two years were presented in August to the project leaders, the fund manager and USAID. 

The first initiatives financed by the ABF are still in their early stages. The fund is targeting transformational Biodiversity, Climate and Social impacts that will materialize in the medium to long run. The deployment of the intervention areas is just getting underway and the results provide a baseline that will make it possible to compare the impacts of the interventions in the near future. For Wendy Francesconi, the Senior Environmental Scientist in the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT, the results up to this point are in line with what was expected.

“Progress is slow. Sustainable systems are being implemented and established, so it's too early to generate the enabling conditions that will result in the use of the restored areas by forest species. All of the ABF Fund's projects are in the implementation stage. We know that in the future we will be able to identify impacts of different kinds, for the different business models and species. What is important is to track this progress of monitoring and evaluation over time,” explains Francesconi, who was responsible for the development and application of TerraBio.

The cases - Horta da Terra and Café Apuí already have the results of two monitoring cycles (2022 and 2023). When compared, they showed an increase in the similarity of the community of insect species (and other arthropods) in the project's intervention areas with the forest’s regions. The total carbon sequestration values were also higher during the second year of monitoring, proving the establishment and growth of sustainable agricultural plots and restoration activities in the areas being restored.

However, some of the other estimated indicators - such as the species richness numbers – appear to have declined from the first to the second year in both projects, as well as the restored areas and connectivity in the landscape in Horta da Terra.

Inocas and ReforesTerra received the results of the first year of Terrabio’ evaluation. In this case, the first year of intervention serves as a baseline for monitoring over the course of time, while the pasture and forest areas serve as a reference for comparing insect communities.

According to Jânio César Rosa, Inocas’ Manager, the company’s aim is to incorporate the results into the business. “We're very excited in relation to the results that we'll have in this second year. We are well aware that there won't yet be any marked increase in biodiversity because the macaúba seedlings are very young, and still only at the start of their development. We are waiting for the results of our oldest planting, which was collected in 2023 and this year. We intend to incorporate the results into our project, which is already focused on sustainability, and then we want to publish these indicators, showing what the increases have been in biodiversity.”

The 2024 collections are almost complete, with the geospatial and laboratory analyses underway. It will shortly be possible to see the results of the third year of the same initiatives. Francesconi explains that in the coming years TerraBio's application will be repeated in the same places and for the fund’s new projects.  

“It's a systematized application, with metrics that are standardized at the portfolio level, making it possible to compare what the fund’s impact will be on the environment. In general, the geospatial results help to monitor the implementation of activities on the ground, while the biodiversity results assist with assessing the impacts of these activities on the distribution of species in the landscape. We are moving from a business-to-business application in a standardized way to portfolio-level analysis in a harmonized way,” explains the Senior Scientist. 

The next steps include analyzing what other applications the methodology can have for ecology in general: “We want to do more with the results, with the data we're collecting, because we're generating very valuable information that could make a major contribution to this area of knowledge, which is the monitoring of biodiversity with e-DNA. We want to do some ecology studies that are reflected in the results, in order to understand a little more about the distribution of species in the different areas where we collect, which would basically be the distribution of species in the landscape and preferences in terms of land usage,” Francesconi concluded.