Inspired by DARPA the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) opens its “Engineering Ecosystem Resilience” research opportunity to ensure that the $44 trillion of economic value generated by nature will not diminish.
With a budget of £50 million (~$67.2 million), ARIA looking to fund about 10 short discovery projects to dive into potential research directions for a program within its Engineering Ecosystem Resilience opportunity space.
For the British government, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience is about the management of valuable natural resources that fuses surveillance and gene editing technologies with other intervention methods to “halt biodiversity loss.”
“Nature is valuable. The services and potential it provides suffer from being underexplored, undervalued but also overexploited:
ARIA, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, September 2025
Over half of global GDP (£34 trillion) depends on nature’s services, spanning:
Provisioning (food, freshwater, raw materials, pollination), Stabilization (climate, flood, pest + disease control), Cultural benefits (recreation, tourism, wellbeing)”
“The deployment of powerful new tools demands ethical considerations, inclusive governance, authentic community engagement, and long-term monitoring”
ARIA, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, September 2025
The program directors at ARIA believe that there cannot be human and planetary prosperity until they are able to properly micro-manage, monitor, manipulate, and maintain the monetary value of nature.
According to the opportunity space, “Our tools to measure, predict, and manage ecosystems are insufficient.”
Therefore, “effective stewardship demands proactive deployment of fit-for-purpose technologies.”
These “fit-for-purpose technologies” include:
When combined, these technologies are believed to be the keys that will “unlock a new integrative paradigm for engineering ecosystem resilience.”
“Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilization. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, we could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive”
ARIA, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, September 2025
In order to be successful, certain groups would have to become stewards over all biodiversity.
Judging by the ARIA opportunity space notes and illustrations, stewardship over biodiversity means putting sensors everywhere to monitor what is there and what is happening; genetically modifying plants and animals to ensure environmental adaptability and “genetic diversity;” and artificially advancing evolution through selective breeding and invasive species interventions in order to engineer ideally balanced ecosystems.
And AI will be central to accelerating all of these interventions.
Stewardship is not so much about preserving what is already in nature — there is some of that — but the wider ambition is to engineer those ecosystems to be more “resilient,” which in theory would maximize the value of nature and lead to prosperity for people and planet.
The belief is that all of these efforts will go towards better “regulating our climate” while “providing the substrates for tomorrow’s medicines and materials.”
“‘Engineering Ecosystem Resilience’ asks whether pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive”
ARIA, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, September 2025
Leading the opportunity space is ARIA program director Yannick Wurm.
According to his bio, Wurm “pioneered the use of molecular tools to assess pollinator health, has built startups to commercialize genome analysis software, and created a real-time network for pollinator monitoring.”
He joined ARIA from Queen Mary University of London, where he is Professor of Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics.
“Could precision sensing and sharper risk forecasts clarify impacts enough to tip the balance? Or do we also need new financial instruments?”
ARIA, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, September 2025
ARIA’s opportunity space for engineering ecosystem resilience follows a global trend of governments and NGOs looking to create a nature-based economy.
The idea that nature has value is a hot topic among public and private entities due to its enormous economic opportunities.
All of our food, fuel, and pharmaceuticals come from nature, so the powers that be want to put prices on nature itself with biodiversity credit schemes that take into account carbon, water, air, vegetation, and soil.
Earlier this year, the United Nations and its partners propose creating a “Nature ID” that would serve as a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that could facilitate carbon market traceability and biodiversity credit schemes.
“By synthesizing information on biodiversity, climate and social factors, Nature ID can make environmental considerations more prominent in policy, private sector and local community
UNDP, The Case for Nature ID, March 2025
decision-making.
“This can unlock nature-positive incentives and direct financial flows—such
as payments for ecosystem services or carbon credits—toward conservation and restoration
initiatives“
“At its core, Nature ID aims to support the monitoring of key ecological indicators—such as vegetation cover, water levels, and pollution metrics—over time. This would enable comparisons between current data and historical benchmarks”
UNDP, The Case for Nature ID, March 2025
Published in March 2025, a study by the UN Development Program (UNDP) called, “The case for Nature ID: How Digital Public Infrastructure can catalyze nature and climate action,” outlines how to digitally track, trace, and price biodiversity through something called a Nature ID.
According to the study, Nature ID is “A proposed digital public infrastructure system for integrating and exchanging environmental, social and administrative data to support conservation and sustainability initiatives.”
DPI is a civic technology stack consisting of three main components: digital ID, massive data sharing between public and private entities, and fast payment systems.
As ARIA looks to monitor and engineer resilient ecosystems, the British government is laying the foundation for other governments, NGOs, tech companies, and financial players to build a nature-based economy.
Image Source: AI generated with Grok
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