Category: AI

The CBA’s AI Fellow Rafael Camargo reflects on the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge

What happens when regenerative landscape practitioners, technologists, and data experts come together to rethink how impact is measured? From 13–15 January 2026, the CBA joined the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge in London to explore exactly that. The hackathon brought together more than 500 participants across 49 teams and 20 charities, creating a fast-paced environment for experimentation with emerging digital tools, particularly generative AI, in service of real-world social and environmental challenges.

For the CBA, the focus was a fundamental barrier to scaling regenerative landscapes: fragmented and inconsistent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data. Across regenerative agriculture, ecological restoration, and other nature-based solutions, projects often track outcomes using different indicators, methods, and systems. While this reflects local needs and constraints, it makes it difficult to compare results, demonstrate impact to stakeholders, ensure accountability, or systematically learn what works best across contexts. Addressing this challenge is central to CBA’s mission to accelerate regenerative approaches globally.

CBA’s work is guided by its seven Principles for Regenerative Landscapes, grounded in strong sustainability, social-ecological resilience, and the recognition of local context as the foundation for landscape regeneration. Translating these principles into practical, consistent, and affordable metrics, however, remains complex. During the hackathon, the CBA invited participants to explore how a shared digital foundation could support a more unified M&E approach, helping project teams identify relevant indicators suited to their local realities, while enabling data to be consolidated in ways that strengthen learning and accountability across projects and geographies. This challenge built directly on CBA’s ongoing work, in collaboration with Nature-based Insights, to develop its M&E framework and accompanying handbook.

In the spirit of learning through exploration, CBA led two teams in a friendly internal competition, testing different ways generative AI might support the democratisation of CBA’s research data, make the identification of appropriate evaluation metrics faster and more accessible, and improve data structuring and knowledge sharing, e.g., solutions such as a CBA-expert chatbot, a Project Design Description auto-screener, an app for data ingestion for non-data engineers. The emphasis was not on producing finished solutions, but on stress-testing ideas, surfacing opportunities, and better understanding where digital tools can meaningfully reduce complexity, and where local knowledge and scientific rigour must remain central.

The hackathon also underscored the value of dialogue between the sustainability and technology communities. A recorded conversation between Talia Smith, CBA’s Chief Programmes Officer, and Jose Gordon, Head of AWS Global Impact, reflects on how cloud computing and AI can be responsibly applied to support regenerative outcomes when guided by clear principles, thoughtful design, and strong partnerships.

While the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge was an experiment rather than an endpoint, it generated valuable insights that will inform the next phase of CBA’s work on monitoring, evaluation, and learning. As CBA continues to refine its M&E framework and support regenerative landscapes worldwide, these explorations help clarify how digital innovation can strengthen, rather than complicate, efforts to measure what matters, learn across projects, and ultimately scale regenerative impact.

Dr Vian Sharif, Founder & President, NatureAlpha, and CBA Ambassador reflects on artificial intelligence and nature

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” – Robert Kennedy

We are positioned at a profound moment of inflection and reflection amidst a world changing at breakneck speed. A moment where the natural world meets the world of artificial intelligence, where the ability to achieve the previously unimaginable at scale meets our personal need for internal peace and connection, and where the vastness of our human potential stretches before us. Yet with great change comes the possibility of great opportunity.

At the cutting edge of our technological revolution are profound advances not only in generative language models, but in generative world models—multi-dimensional representations of our planet and the myriad relationships that operate within it, previously unknown, which are used by AI to make predictions, model outcomes, and ultimately make decisions. Satellite data, on-the-ground monitoring, and scientific research can be processed at a rate faster than ever to surface insights about the natural world that have never before been understood. Significant releases by the world’s largest technology players point to this phenomenon continuing at pace.

But why should we care? Because with these tools applied to better understand our natural world, invisible connections become visible.

This is useful intelligence.

How business intersects with our natural world is no longer hidden. Instead, it is now within our grasp to understand in ways that were previously inaccessible and model the future. How water supply in our vast programme of data centre expansion will dwindle or lead to flooding as nature fades, how implementing mitigation or circular practices within a business process can minimise risks to operational capacity and lower the cost of capital, or how nature is protected where it should be, in service to all citizens of our common home, can be revealed. Where, how, and when we make these decisions can be evaluated, measured, and implemented.

Yet this also reveals a paradox. In talking with indigenous peoples, these connections are not new, but ancient. These are relationships between systems, animal and mineral, that have been mapped over generations and centuries. The ebb and flow of life is central to multi-generational decision-making. And every one of their decisions depends on nature, whose services support us in every single facet of our lives – from feeding us to enabling our businesses to function.

These insights, which to us are newly revealed, are, instead, helping us remember what these custodians of nature have always known.

As the work of the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance has shown already, with the arrival of our times and our technology, we have been given an opportunity to reimagine. The creation of the AI Fellowship for a Nature Positive Economy serves this and nature’s mission.

These new insights provide a powerful leverage point. Intersect this with the potential leverage achieved when deployed across our private, financial and public sector decision-making, and the opportunity to bend the arc to write the positive history of our generation is surely unimaginably compounded.

Photo: Pexels/Marek Piwnicki

The Circular Bioeconomy Alliance (CBA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Rafael Camargo as the first CBA Fellow on Artificial Intelligence for a Nature-First Economy.

Supported financially by NatureAlpha, the Fellowship aims to link nature, finance and AI capabilities, leveraging cutting-edge technology to support monitoring and evaluation in the CBA’s projects globally.

CBA CEO Marc Palahí said: “AI technology has great potential but also risks for Nature and humanity. Artificial Intelligence can add exponential value to Living Intelligence if harnessed in a transparent, meaningful, and ethical way. The CBA is immensely grateful to NatureAlpha for funding this pioneering Fellowship, which will explore how AI can support our understanding and management of complex socio-ecological systems.”

Vian Sharif, Founder and President of NatureAlpha said: “We are at a pivotal juncture for nature and biodiversity, where the advancement of AI and technology can fundamentally impact the accessibility of quality nature data. This in turn has the potential to help deliver meaningful real world action, supporting NatureAlpha and CBA’s shared principles of accelerating the transition to a nature-first economy. We are extremely excited to partner with CBA on the launch of its AI Fellowship. Rafael’s knowledge, experience and passion make him exceptionally well placed to deliver on the fellowship’s key objectives.”

The Fellowship aims to operationalise the principles and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) outlined in the CBA Principles for Regenerative Landscapes and the forthcoming CBA Monitoring and Evaluation Handbook. It will deliver innovative solutions and digital tools that support and empower CBA partners to design, monitor and report their Living Labs.

Key objectives include:

• providing insights on the role of AI in advancing the monitoring, tracking, and implementation of landscape regeneration, while enhancing transparency and accountability
• creating comprehensive, interoperable data layers that provide insights into biodiversity, ecosystem services, and circular bioeconomy indicators in space and time
• developing user-friendly platforms, APIs, or tools that enable the CBA monitoring and evaluation framework to utilise data for decision-making, tracking progress, and impact assessment
• ensuring research and tools are responsive to real-world needs and are applied effectively, by collaborating with CBA Affiliate Members, Living Lab partners as well as other stakeholders.

The new Fellow Rafael Camargo has a background in geospatial data science and is passionate about harnessing nature data and artificial intelligence to advance corporate sustainability and accelerate the transition towards a nature-positive, circular bioeconomy. He is Head of Geospatial Engineering at NatureAlpha, where he leads the development of innovative data-driven tools that enable businesses and financial institutions to assess and manage their nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks, and opportunities.

Prior to joining NatureAlpha, Rafael was a senior consultant at BCG/Quantis, advising major corporations on sustainability strategies, and before that he worked at WWF, where he managed data and technology for the Water Risk Filter and Biodiversity Risk Filter. He has contributed to global sustainability frameworks and guidance, including the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), and the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB).

More information

About the CBA

The Circular Bioeconomy Alliance (CBA) was established in 2020 by His Majesty King Charles III (formerly His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales), and became a registered charity in September 2023. The CBA aims to accelerate the transition to a nature-first economy that is both powered by nature and prospers in harmony with it. It delivers transformative impact at scale through its global network of Living Labs that blend science, technology and indigenous knowledge to holistically regenerate landscapes, support communities and rethink value chains.

About NatureAlpha

NatureAlpha provides AI and data-driven insights to support a range of solutions including nature and biodiversity risk-related metrics, indexed products, compliance tools and nature-linked financial consulting. NatureAlpha utilises curated datasets from the world’s most authoritative scientific, regulatory, corporate and governmental sources including internationally agreed goals as detailed in the Convention for Biodiversity and IUCN, and in line with the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures’ framework.

www.naturealpha.ai