When losing money it is often a good idea to figure-out why you lost money.
And if you can do so prior to the losses, you can immediately move on to new and hitherto undreamt-of ways to lose money.
Monday's ‘NYSE/natural asset companies’ post being an excellent example. Jumping down that rabbit hole leads to, well, this. First up Refinitiv, June 10, 2020:
Spatial finance offers socio-economic and environmental insights that have the potential to enhance data transparency in the financial system. How could this help create a smoother transition to sustainable development?
- Spatial finance, the integration of geospatial data into financial practice, can help increase transparency within the financial system for practitioners and data providers alike.
- Sustainability related risks can be better managed through the use of geospatial data. It can also assist in the analysis and management of other factors affecting risk and return in different asset classes.
- A primary objective of The Future of Sustainable Data Alliance, an industry partnership co-founded with Refinitiv, is employing new data and technology to support a just transition to sustainable development.
Today, more geospatial data is being collected than ever before. New generations of small satellites are orbiting our planet, taking high resolution images of every point on Earth, enabling us to observe planetary-scale change on a daily basis. ‘Spatial finance’ is the integration of this geospatial data and analysis into financial theory and practice.
When combined with artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically scan and interpret this vast amount of visual data on the cloud, the true capabilities of spatial finance become apparent.
Combining Earth observation and remote sensing with AI can transform the availability of information in our financial system, and to change how risks, opportunities, and impacts are measured and managed by financial institutions and civil society....
....MUCH MORE
If financial markets are to realign towards truly sustainable development the financial sector needs to differentiate commercial actors more accurately on their climate and environmental performance. A potential breakthrough to help in this challenge is the emerging field of ‘Spatial Finance’, the independent assessment of the location of a company’s or a country’s assets and infrastructure using ground data, remote sensing observations and modelled insights, offers a potentially transformative means to gain improved quantitative ESG insights. Rapid development is required if spatial finance is to deliver in the short term. In this report, authors outline a possible taxonomy and hierarchy for spatial finance, showing how discrete forms of technology, approaches and data can be considered within a single consistent framework. Using this framework, spatial finance could provide insights at differing scales for different applications from the asset-scale for project finance, to company-scale for investment, to country scale for sovereign debt. Throughout the document authors provide insights into current cutting-edge developments within the field, illustrated with case studies from practitioners and data providers, and explore potential future developments.
So skipping over there we see:
Nature and Spatial FinanceWe have taken nature as the basis of all human economic activity for granted. The economy and the finance sector depend as well as impact nature. Financial decisions need to take these risks and opportunities into account. To date such assessments have been difficult. However, with the advance in geo-spatial and earth observation data combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, new opportunities are rapidly developing to manage risk, opportunity and impact. This new and emerging field is called Spatial Finance.
Through the application of the WWF-SIGHT data and tool, WWF-UK has been developing case studies and engagement with the finance sector for a number of years. We now actively advocate for spatial finance approaches and tools to be rapidly provided by third party data providers and adopted by finance institutions....
....MUCH MORE
Ah, very innovative. And it is in the interstices between the average person's mental maps and the innovation where the real money will be made.
There is much more that we will be looking at as COP 26 in Glasgow gets underway.
*See for example:
- "Bill Gates Backs Plan to Surveil the Entire Planet From Space"
- Amazon and the CIA Want to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Us From Space (AMZN; NVDA)
- "Using Satellites to Forecast Metals and Commodity Prices""How satellites, drones, and planes are making hedge funds money"
- New Orwellian Hedge Fund Watches All The World's Shipping For Billionaires
- The Start-up That Watches Corn Grow, From Orbit
- Hedge Funds Using Satellites To Track Consumer, Infrastructure and Commodity Trends
- "Artificial Intelligence to reveal the biggest secret in oil"
- SpaceNet: Join NVIDIA; DGI, Amazon and CIA-Backed CosmiQ Works In Exploiting Publicly Available Satellite Imagery and Data (AMZN; DGI; NVDA; CIA)
- Hedge Funds: "The Tipping Point for Alternative Data"
- "Using Satellite Imagery Data to Generate Alpha"
Why yes, we do have an interest in this stuff.
