Cover photo: (Corey Martignetti, 2025) Corey Martignetti and Andrés Anchondo represent ABC’s BirdsPlus program at The Nest Climate Campus in New York City for Climate Week NYC.
“American Bird Conservancy was excited to be selected to the CFA Incubator to assist in the development of a business plan for the BirdsPlus Index, a unique and innovative approach to measuring biodiversity and nature impact. With the growing need for conservation finance to address the $900 billion nature funding gap, the BirdsPlus Index will provide stakeholders with a quantifiable, insightful, and scalable way to measure and validate nature impact by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and clearly measuring site-level biodiversity using birds as effective indicators of ecosystem condition.” — Corey Martignetti, Senior Director of Impact Investing at American Bird Conservancy, USA
Last year, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) took a major step toward transforming how biodiversity is measured, valued, and financed. As part of the Conservation Finance Alliance (CFA) Incubator Program (round 3), ABC’s BirdsPlus team, Eliot Miller, Corey Martignetti, Holly Robertson, and Andrés Anchondo, have been developing innovative monitoring strategies that use birds as indicators of ecosystem integrity and nature-positive impact in conservation finance and value chains.
Supported by the CFA Incubator, ABC traveled to New York Climate Week 2025 to present the BirdsPlus Index and explore how biodiversity data can help companies, investors, and decisionmakers align with frameworks like TNFD (The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) and SBTN (Science-based Targets for Nature). Their participation included leading Climate Week participants on two bird walks through Central Park and the High Line, where they showcased how birds connect people to nature and discussed the power of birds as ecological indicators to drive measurable conservation outcomes.
At Climate Week, the team engaged with a wide range of participants, from impact investors and corporate sustainability leaders to carbon project developers and regenerative agriculture practitioners. These conversations helped refine the BirdsPlus Index value proposition and opened doors to collaborations focused on landscape-level impact and blended-finance mechanisms.
Among the most inspiring takeaways was seeing biodiversity firmly placed within the global climate finance dialogue. There’s growing momentum to integrate nature into business and investment decisions, and through the Incubator, BirdsPlus can be positioned as a bridge between biodiversity science and corporate action.
The CFA Incubator’s mentorship and exposure have strengthened ABC’s ability to scale its innovation, from refining its business model to building strategic partnerships that can turn data into impact. The team is now finalizing a BirdsPlus Index business plan to guide its next phase of growth, incorporating lessons learned from New York and beyond.
This collaboration demonstrates what’s possible when biodiversity science meets conservation finance. With continued guidance from the CFA network, the BirdsPlus team is well on its way to helping companies and stakeholders invest more effectively in projects and practices that conserve biodiversity, proving that safeguarding nature can go hand in hand with sustainable growth.
Photo: (Eliot Miller, 2024) An autonomous recording unit, an audio recording device, deployed by the BirdsPlus team in Costa Rica for bioacoustics monitoring.