Q&A with Shana Vida Gavron of Endangered Wildlife OÜ

Endangered Wildlife OÜ is the realisation of an idea that was born more than 15 years ago, after the founder, Shana Vida Gavron, set out to find a solution to link finance with conservation.

It was recognised that one of the challenges for conservation is that there is a lack of understanding when it comes to the real value of biodiversity. It is intrinsically understood that biodiversity is important but it has been difficult to hold stakeholders accountable or responsible for their positive or negative actions. This is due to the fact that, until Endangered Wildlife OÜ, there has been no tool in the market that allows for the financial valuation of biodiversity.

The formation of Endangered Wildlife OÜ and the development of the Biodiversity Valuator means that there is now a tool that can provide a financial species existence and impact value for individual species in specified locations. This solution is unique and allows for corporates and investors to measure their monetary impact and impact return on investment in a comparable and quantifiable manner.

The biodiversity valuation is based on a combination of methodologies that have been brought together using an internally developed algorithm. The value includes:

1. Carbon value - this is based on the mainstream carbon valuation and is suitable mostly for plants and pollinators.
2. Aesthetic value - this is a traditional intrinsic value for biodiversity.
3. Economic value - this is a combination of up to 28 species-specific ecosystem services.
4. Hedge value - this is a financial value that considers the willingness to pay in order to maintain a population between the minimum viable population and the carrying capacity.

Together these form the Species Existence Value. We then calculate the Impact Value, which is based on a 30-year simulation taking into account an active management strategy and how the target species interacts with other species and exogenous variables within the ecosystem. The Species Existence Value plus the Impact Value together form the Total Conservation Value.

While this is a very complicated calculation to perform, which requires environmental, financial and statistical expertise, we believe that it will help people and companies to better understand the benefits of working in synergy with biodiversity.

The world is a monetary economy and it is believed that, until people can understand and relate to the value of biodiversity, they do not understand their responsibility to conserve and not to over utilise it. The benefit of being able to place a financial value onto species is that people will begin to understand the importance of biodiversity, and corporates and investors will be able to better incorporate biodiversity into their investment, reporting and decision making process.

Our main goal, therefore, is to have as great an impact as possible by making our services available so as to raise awareness about the fact that it is possible to integrate biodiversity into our daily lives. This will help to raise awareness about the cost of actions.

Biodiversity is crucial to our existence and we advocate that we need to acknowledge and respect that each species is here for a reason. We are just one species out of 8.7 million species, and we are all interconnected. So, if we start to remove too many species, the entire network can collapse.