Lea Selina Vannini
Academic Engagement Associate
The Interspecies Money Workshop at the World Biodiversity Forum will explore how emerging financial and technological infrastructures could help redefine humanity’s relationship with nature. The concept of Interspecies Money, developed by Jonathan Ledgard, investigates how non-human entities such as animals, forests, rivers and ecosystems could be represented as economic actors through digital identities, AI-supported ecological data and blockchain-based financial systems.
The workshop will bring together a carefully curated group of participants from research, policy, finance, business, and civil society to critically explore the opportunities, limitations and future implications of this idea. Rather than presenting a finished solution, the workshop is designed as an interactive space for collective thinking, interdisciplinary exchange, and early-stage collaboration.
A central goal of the workshop is to initiate conversations around the future of nature finance and biodiversity governance, and to explore how new models of value creation and capital allocation could support ecosystem wellbeing in more direct and regenerative ways. We hope to engage stakeholders who can contribute expertise, challenge assumptions and potentially help shape future pilot projects, partnerships and implementation pathways.
Do you want to be part of this discussion? Let us know why by filling out the sign-up form and briefly share your background and motivation for joining the workshop.
Please note that participation is by invitation only. Selected participants are expected to arrange and cover their own travel and accommodation expenses and should have access to the World Biodiversity Forum.
For more information on the workshop, please go here. To register for the World Biodiversity Forum and more information on the overall programme, go here. To know more about Interspecies Money, check out this page.
We will review submissions and follow up with selected participants as soon as possible.
Moderators
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Bio
Dr Lena Robra
Head of Academic Engagement, Swissnex in IndiaDr. Lena Robra has been heading the Academic Engagement team at Swissnex in India since 2021. She is a trained biochemist who now connects the dots between Switzerland’s research and education ecosystem with India but occasionally also extends to South Asia or the African continent. She has a strong interest in antimicrobial resistance and constantly thinks about engaging ways to connect people and experts across disciplines. Before she joined Swissnex, Lena led the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum, an entity formed by Bengaluru’s academic institutions aimed at bringing the UN SDGs to the local context. She holds a PhD in Biology from the National Science Institute/Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
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Bio
Jonathan Ledgard
Founder, Interspecies Money GroupJonathan Ledgard is the inventor of Interspecies Money (IM), a concept that enables non-human species to participate in the market economy. He is Founder and CEO of Tehanu, the first working prototype of IM: a digital infrastructure that gives other species a form of identity, AI-inferred interests, and the capacity to hold and direct capital. Jonathan spent two decades as a foreign and war correspondent for The Economist, reporting lead stories from more than 60 countries. As a director at EPFL in Switzerland, he invented the drone delivery of blood and medicines and the ‘Droneport’ concept for Africa. He is a visiting professor in AI and Nature at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he works to advance the representation of other species in emergent AI. He is also a critically acclaimed novelist. Giraffe has become a cult work among animal rights activists. Submergence was a New York Times Book of the Year and has been adapted for film.
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