Using earth observations and ecosystem modeling to improve the sustainability of agribusiness and extractive industries in working landscapes

Managing and monitoring biodiversity is a major challenge and opportunity for business, especially in rangelands, as one of the most heavily managed and often degraded natural systems that provides significant resources and raw materials for production. One of the largest and most threatened grasslands in the world is in Mongolia, which has seen a rapid rise in grazing pressure due to increasing global demand for cashmere along with privatization of a formerly government-run livestock industry. A new opportunity is emerging for Earth observation information to improve the management decisions of the producers and their incentive-setters, leading to a more sustainable rangeland system and better outcomes for biodiversity and people in this unique and imperiled landscape. Oyu Tolgoi (OT), the Mongolian subsidiary of the mining company Rio Tinto, in cooperation with Kering, an apparel conglomerate that sources cashmere from the region, are providing financial incentives to shift producers to more sustainable grazing patterns in order to restore the degraded rangeland ecosystem in the Gobi desert region. Both companies are motivated by sustainability commitments they have made to reduce their environmental impacts through offsets or improved raw material sourcing. These companies are working with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the goat-herding cooperatives in the region to reduce herd size for more regenerative grazing, and they are funding WCS to monitor the effect of these interventions on biomass production and plant diversity. While critical, the monitoring cannot provide sufficient coverage across the 800,000 project area, which limits full evaluation of the impacts of business activities on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Our partnership with these three key actors in the region will co-develop tools that can be used to predict the effect of changing grazing practices on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and where these interventions will have greatest impact. Our work will integrate Earth observations and ecosystem modeling to scale up monitoring data and forecast future impacts. This rangeland production model will be based on the soil-vegetation model CENTURY and the livestock model GRAZPLAN, linked to an auto-calibration process using remote-sensing vegetation indices, and validated with in-situ monitoring data. Model outputs will include biomass production and plant species diversity, and will feed into other InVEST models that can be adapted to take biomass as an input, moving toward continuous functions of ecosystem services relating to habitat condition or quality rather than categorical habitat type. WCS will use the rangeland production model in their work with the goat-herding cooperatives to understand how much of an impact their altered management plans can have and where they should focus most of their efforts. OT will use the rangeland production model to measure the effectiveness of their conservation programs and evaluate future opportunities to determine how best to invest their resources to meet their sustainability goals and achieve Net Positive Impact on biodiversity. Kering will use our new platform integrating the new InVEST rangeland production model and associated remote-sensing datasets with other ecosystem service models within InVEST, as inputs to a tool they already use for assessing their supply chain impacts: the Environmental Profit & Loss account. Pairing remote-sensing products with mechanistic modeling of biomass, biodiversity, and related ecosystem services provides a path forward for companies to assess the impacts of improved grazing practices across larger areas than possible through monitoring alone, and enables a scaling up of such approaches to make more rapid progress toward their sustainability commitments.