Plasma Ventures is a proud partner of MIT Solve. Through Solve’s Resilient Ecosystems Global Challenge, technology-based solutions that help communities restore, sustain, and benefit from resilient ecosystems were identified, developed, assessed and funded. In partnership and support from MITSolve and its network of advisors and funders, Solve incubated solutions that:
- Preserve and restore carbon-rich ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots, whether terrestrial, coastal, or marine.
- Provide scalable and verifiable monitoring and data collection to track ecosystem conditions, such as biodiversity, carbon stocks, or productivity.
- Aggregate local projects to enable access to financial capital for ecosystem services such as natural hazard mitigation, water quality, and carbon storage.
- Create scalable economic opportunities for local communities, including fishing, timber, tourism, and regenerative agriculture, that are aligned with thriving and biodiverse ecosystems
Resilient Ecosystems Challenge Finalists
- Folio Seed Bank – Folio Seed Bank is a collaborative green manure seed bank operating in a seed-for-data trade system connected to a network of farmers, scientists, and farmer-scientists. Farmers get cheap seeds and return that seed with structured agronomic data for open-source knowledge development
- Buy-In Community Planning aims to improve the well-being of people whose neighborhoods are threatened by natural hazards by assisting them in planning and relocating to safer areas. Buy-In uses geospatial data tools and cross-sector partnerships to match households with the resources they need to relocate, creating more buy-in for the voluntary home buyout process.
- Mapeo is a mobile and desktop application, co-created by Indigenous groups in the Amazon, that enables communities to map and monitor critical ecosystems. Users are able to gather, share, and manage data within a trusted network and export it to other applications and audiences.
- HEAL Fisheries helps communities cultivate snakehead fish in peatland canals, and provides ways to harvest value-added products such as albumin from the fish in addition to food. This additional revenue, and a linkage between environmental quality and product quality, enables and encourages community conservation of peat ecosystems.
- SafetyNet Technologies is working towards a world where humans and the ocean thrive together through precision fishing technologies that enable observation, measurement, and response to fishing activities and changes in the ocean. Pisces – SafetyNet Technology’s first precision fishing tool, is a simple to use, affordable, LED light-emitting device that retrofits onto any existing fishing nets. It helps fishers attract the size and species of fish they’re licensed to catch while repelling non-target species, acting as an emergency escape sign—ultimately lowering bycatch by up to 90 percent.
- BioMio is a subscription-based model that directly links farmer and consumer, guarantees a fair income, and strengthens ecosystems with regenerative agriculture. It also creates local cross-sector synergies between different actors to strengthen the chain from soil to table, applying all principles of a circular economy.
- NovFeed has developed proprietary technology that transforms organic waste to produce bacterial, single-cell, protein-based fish feed ingredients to replace fish and soybean meals, which are commonly used in feed formulation. NovFeed’s production process uses less land, less water, less energy and grows 300 percent faster than soy and fishmeal. These single-cell bacteria utilise organic waste as a source of carbon and energy, upcycling organic waste.