High-tech help for an ancient lake

Russia's Lake Baikal in southern Siberia holds a fifth of the world's unfrozen freshwater. It is home to thousands of species of plants and animals that are found nowhere else. Its northern shores -- as anyone using the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool or IBAT (biodiversityinfo.org/ibat), an online database, can easily discover -- form part of a World Heritage site.

There are also several Russian national parks and reserves in the area. Four species of birds considered "vulnerable" by conservationists, including the greater spotted eagle and the lesser white-fronted goose, can be found in a local wetland. The "critically endangered" Siberian crane flies through on the way to its summer nesting grounds.

If Transneft, a Russian firm that proposed a few years ago to build an oil pipeline through the Baikal region, had been able to see all this information -- including detailed maps of especially biodiverse spots and the threatened species that inhabit them -- at the click of a mouse, then it might have altered its plans and avoided those spots. This would have spared it some of the $1 billion that it claims that shifting the pipeline's route, as it has agreed to do after persistent protests, will cost.

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing Conservation International, the nonprofit that conceived IBAT, had in mind when it decided to bring together as much data on biodiversity as it could in a single database, to be unveiled this week at the forthcoming World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Big oil and agro-industrial firms such as BP and Minnetonka-based Cargill Inc. helped with the design, as did several banks. The idea is to make it easier for businesses to incorporate concerns about conservation into their planning from the beginning of a project, and not simply when protesters show up at their offices.

Many conservation groups compile information about biodiversity in one form or another. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the organizer of the meeting in Barcelona, maintains a list of national parks and other protected areas in conjunction with the United Nations Environment Program. The IUCN also produces the often-quoted "Red List" of species at risk (the source of labels such as "vulnerable" and "critically endangered"). And the IUCN, Conservation International, BirdLife International and various other such organizations have long been collaborating on a systematic assessment of the well being of as many different species as possible. They have already worked their way through birds and amphibians, and have started looking at reptiles, corals, mangroves and sharks. They will reveal their findings about mammals at the conference, along with updated versions of the Red List and the database concerning protected areas.

The World Bank, for one, has guidelines that require borrowers to protect biodiversity. By the same token, many commercial banks have signed up to the Equator Principles, a set of ethical rules for bankers that enshrine respect for conservation. But consulting the many lists and databases can be a chore for firms -- especially smaller ones without whole departments devoted to environmental propriety. Moreover, many of them are reluctant to share their plans with conservation groups until they are quite advanced, for fear of giving away commercial secrets and stirring up opposition. Anyway, most conservation groups do not have the capacity to answer endless inquiries from anxious firms.

But IBAT brings lots of information together in a single, accessible source. Better still, it is anonymous. Firms will have to register to use it, but no records will be kept of what they look up. BP, for example, says it could use IBAT to check whether areas where it might bid for exploration licenses are ecologically sensitive, without alerting competitors to its interest. It also thinks that IBAT could come in handy when planning pipeline routes.