2004 Forum Report: Financing Technologies for the Environment

Financing Technologies for Measuring and Monitoring the Environment

Facilitated by Ruth Norris, Skoll Foundation

Most of the participants in this session were focused on financing Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) for the Environment as a discrete business in and of itself rather than measuring the Environmental impacts of a changed business process or product innovation they had introduced.

This focus led to some interesting insights on how companies might specialize in building monitoring and evaluation tools that measure the impacts of other businesses and projects while creating a self sustaining business; as M&E increasingly becomes an issue for socially and environmentally focused ventures, the opportunities for private service providers in the M&E area are increasingly apparent.

Key Insights:

Focus: Keep Monitoring and Evaluation products clearly linked to discrete, understandable products; as in the case of Green Map System and International Seakeepers.

Customer: Clear offers to different clients are critical; often the same data sets if creatively applied can be useful to a variety of different clients providing greater revenue opportunities.

The Right Tools: Easy to use tools was a recurrent theme; both for the collection of data (as in passive systems for gathering oceanographic data employed by Seakeepers) and for the representation of data (as in the first international map symbol typography developed by Green Map System.)

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