Alo Mundus is a disruptive SME which seeks to help financial services industries and responsible businesses create sustainable urban environments through investment into targeted nature-based solutions and local urban forestry projects. We will do this via a revolutionary marketplace solution which enables financial service industries to find and invest in high-quality nature-based solutions (NBS), including local UK-based urban forestry projects. The Alo Mundus platform provides financial services investors with the verified and audited reports and transparent public ledger that they need to effectively quantify, monitor and demonstrate the environmental, biodiversity and social impacts of their climate and environmental risk (CER) mitigation investments. Our cutting-edge forecasting and monitoring tools and quantification methodologies are co-developed with world-leading research expertise at University College London and the Universities of Exeter and Reading. These uniquely holistic quantifications cover climate, environmental, biodiversity and social benefits and are powered by satellite monitoring technologies and advanced and scalable approaches for ground-truthing, e.g., of soil carbon sequestration. This project is central to Alo Mundus' vision to help investors think beyond carbon offsets, enabling them to do more than simply offset carbon footprints, with targeted NBS investments broadening the positive impact they can have on local communities. Urban tree planning delivers many benefits, from heat reduction to protecting biodiversity: it creates sustainable and liveable cities. The Alo Mundus platform is designed to enable urban forestry projects to happen where they otherwise might not have been possible due to a lack of public funding or available investment. This Phase 2 project builds upon the success of the Phase 1 prototype solution with deployment. testing and validation of the platform in a real-world environment centred on a major urban forestry project delivered by South Lanarkshire Council. We will work with Unum, HSBC-UK and Pollination to refine a model for NBS project financing, which facilitates creation of and investment in nature-positive assets and projects, including urban forests. Key aspects include the investor marketplace: enabling financial services to easily discover and select the right NBS project in which to invest; novel tokenisation to assign values to the CER mitigation benefits of investments based on their climate, environmental, biodiversity and social benefits; and a ledger, providing transparent, traceable transactions of NBS investments via an NFT blockchain process. Success will enable the financial services industry to unlock benefits from heat reduction to protecting biodiversity, helping create sustainable and liveable cities and achieve carbon net zero.

Our project is looking to provide detailed independent verification and audit of the impact of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) to mitigate climate change to the financial services sector thereby encouraging more investment in the companies pursuing sustainability as investors will have confidence that their money is being used effectively.