Aamozish-e-Mahol

Sparśa is a women-led Nepali social business turning agricultural byproducts into fully compostable menstrual pads, addressing poverty, stigma, gender inequality, and plastic pollution. By sourcing banana fibers locally and applying innovative engineering, Sparśa delivers safe, affordable, plastic-free pads while creating dignified green jobs for women. Profits are reinvested into menstrual health education, ensuring lasting community impact. The enterprise integrates user-centered research, quality testing, and market strategies to guarantee comfort, safety, and cultural acceptance. Its Ambassador Program empowers youth and adults to challenge taboos and foster dialogue. Beyond Nepal, Sparśa serves as a pilot for replication in other regions and with diverse fiber plants, sharing open knowledge through global cooperation. By combining innovation, empowerment, and sustainability, Sparśa advances menstrual health and a plastic-free future, with local partnerships already active across the Global South.

This standartised solution combines drone technology and an innovative allometric approach to monitor and assess crocodilian populations who face significant threats, leading to population declines with 50% the 27 crocodilian species are threatened, with 25% critically endangered. Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capture images of even partially submerged crocodiles, allowing precise, non-invasive length estimates based on head-to-body allometric ratios. This method overcomes challenges like logistical constraints, cost, need for highly trained personnel, observer bias, detectability, wildlife disturbance, and safety risks of traditional surveys. By covering remote areas efficiently, the solution enhances biodiversity mo,nitoring, informs conservation strategies, and enables a wide range of additional information to be collected. This solution is very cheap, requiring minimal training, and accessible to a wide range of users, including indigenous peoples and local communities and conservation practitioners.

WildGuard AI is an Edge AI-powered sensing system by NOARKTECH designed to protect biodiversity and reduce climate-related risks in forest and farm landscapes. Using IIoT (Industrial internet of things) devices connected via LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) and LTE (Long Term Evolution), it detects wildfires, heatwaves, and human-wildlife conflict in real time. It combines bioacoustic AI (e.g., elephant and hornbill calls), temperature, and gas sensors to detect anomalies early.

Paired with PAMS (Protected Area Management & Security System), a dashboard for real-time alerts, analytics, and visualization, the system supports proactive action. Piloted in India’s Western Ghats, it helped reduce crop loss, fire spread, and wildlife threats. WildGuard AI and PAMS enable scalable, affordable, and sustainable nature-based intelligence for climate resilience and conservation.

Ribbit is a citizen science web app that uses few-shot transfer machine learning to record, identify, and classify frog and toad calls, contributing crowdsourced data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to address data gaps, especially in the Global South. Identification apps offer significant potential for automatic in situ biodiversity monitoring (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, 2022; Tuia et al., 2022; Nieto-Mora et al., 2023). Our app focuses on anurans, as they are crucial ecosystem indicators (Estes-Zumpf et al., 2022), with over 40% of the species at risk of extinction, and their unique vocalizations are ideal for acoustic identification. Beta testers revealed the app’s potential to contribute data to GBIF while empowering citizen scientists to engage in ecological monitoring. By creating an open-access platform for labeling biodiversity data, Ribbit enables conservation organizations to develop strategies for protecting vulnerable populations and preserving critical ecosystems.

Koh Tao is an island in Thailand with rich biodiversity and considered one of the best diving sites in the world. Tourism is the main source of income for locals, with up to 700,000 visitors per year before COVID-19.  

With the pandemic, taxi and small fishing boat drivers lost their income. UNDP BIOFIN partnered with the Krungthai Bank, Raks Thai Foundation, UNDP Thailand, and the Koh Tao Sub-district Municipality to launch “Koh Tao Better Together”: a crowdfunding campaign to support the livelihoods of those affected by the interruption in tourism while contributing to biodiversity conservation. The campaign raised USD 92,847, surpassing the target of USD 64,800 within 90 days. 

Funds were used to create a cash-for-work program. 200 boat drivers were hired for three months to clean beaches, collect marine debris, and mobilize locals. These efforts resulted in the collection of 40 tons of marine debris and engaged the local community in long-term conservation.  

Declining pollinator populations are threatening fruit quality, yields and farmer incomes in Himachal Pradesh’s apple orchards. To improve production and climate resilience, the Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector – India promoted pollination as an ecosystem service in cooperation with its partners Dr Y S Parmar University for Horticulture & Forestry (UHF) and the Keystone Foundation. Implemented in Shimla and Kullu, the project focused on the conservation of native pollinators like Apis cerana bees and scientific pollination management. Activities included training farmers and micro-entrepreneurs in beekeeping and honey processing, fostering the establishment of mud hives and bee hotels, enhancing seasonal bee flora, and reducing pesticide use among others through a large-scale awareness campaign. Improved pollination boosts fruit size and quality, reduces June drop and supports resilience to climate and weather-related risks, while beekeeping offers farmers diversified income opportunities.