Canopy is a pan-African conservation intelligence and finance platform covering all 54 African countries and 200 key protected areas. It is designed to support anyone deploying conservation capital across Africa, giving them an independent, apples-to-apples comparison of country financial need, country risk, country conservation performance, and protected area performance.
Using 3 scoring models and 3 data pipelines (including 11 satellite feeds), Canopy brings real-time ecological, financial, and geopolitical intelligence into natural capital investment decision-making. The platform also provides an independent monitoring and evaluation tool, tracking conservation performance and land-use of protected areas and buffer zones over time.
It uses three scoring models across parks, countries and finance:
Canopy pairs large language models with structured datasets and direct satellite observation. Every entry runs through a rigorous pipeline: drafted or computed, challenged by a second critical pass, then versioned and snapshotted so the full history is auditable.
For every PA, country, and carbon project, the model reads operator reports, academic papers, independent journalism, NGO investigations, and official disclosures. It scores each dimension on a five-rung rubric and produces a composite.
Alongside this reading work, Canopy pulls in hard data. Credit ratings, bond market data, conflict data, global protected area mapping, plus the Verra carbon registry.
And Canopy watches from orbit. Eleven Earth-observation layers per protected area: fire (NASA FIRMS active-fire thermal), forest loss (DIST-ALERT on Sentinel-2 and Landsat), vegetation (MODIS NDVI greenness anomalies), surface water (Sentinel-2 NDWI open-water extent), night-time lights (VIIRS DNB monthly), burned area (MODIS MCD64A1), land use inside the boundary and in the buffer (Dynamic World with Sentinel-2 spectral unmixing), biomass (ESA CCI above-ground carbon), rainfall (CHIRPS week-of-year anomaly), soil moisture (SMAP L4 root-zone, fused with rainfall as a drought cross-check), and forest structure (GEDI canopy height and cover). They range from near-daily anomaly sweeps through monthly monitors to multi-year land-use and carbon analysis.
The satellite stack is being extended. An above-ground biomass trend now runs alongside the live feeds, and two analytical layers, a fire-risk forecast and few-shot ground-feature detection, are in development, each entering as context first and held to a precision bar set in advance. The method, its acceptance bars, and its known limits, including a measured audit of the fire feed's geometry, are documented in full.
Country context for the parks above: how much risk conservation finance runs in each sovereign, and where the estate sits.
Conservation news plus fire, forest, vegetation and water satellite watches, gathered for every keystone country and protected area. Browse by place, or read the weekly feed.
Canopy is a pan-African conservation intelligence and finance platform covering all 54 African countries and 200 key protected areas.
Built for funders, investors, operators, NGOs and governments who need to compare country risk, country conservation performance and protected area performance on the same basis before committing capital.
It does two things that are usually done apart. It is the measurement layer conservation M&E runs on, measuring what is actually happening on the ground, park by park, from orbit and from the public record, with operator disclosures read as claims rather than as outcomes. And it sets that measurement against the money: what a country costs to protect, what it currently receives, and how risky it is to fund.
The underlying information is scattered across registries, government portals, satellite archives and specialist publications. Canopy gathers it, then adds its own measurement on top.
Founders
Tony Hansen. Tony has over 30 years of experience in advising and directing complex global programmes across conservation, sustainability, infrastructure, tourism, and high-impact events. In his most recent role, he was the Director of McKinsey's Natural Capital and Nature group. Core roles included helping companies on their net-zero and nature-positive transition and assisting governments in their design and implementation of the UN's Global Biodiversity Framework. Prior to this, he was the managing director of McKinsey's Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII), a community of the world's senior leaders in infrastructure who are committed to the pursuit of smart, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure. Before joining McKinsey, Tony worked as a management consultant and entrepreneur for more than 20 years. Tony is on the advisory board of Tompkins Conservation, a global conservation organisation that creates national parks, recovers imperilled wildlife, and promotes sustainable local communities.
Ralph Lazar. Ralph is a sovereign default risk specialist by background, formerly Fixed Income Proprietary Trading at CSFB, with the firm's own capital at risk, preceded by Global Economics & Strategy at Barings and Global Equity Strategy at Goldman Sachs. University of Cape Town (Law, Econ) and LSE (MSc Econ). His current professional interests are conservation, putting large data sets and LLMs to good use, and deep learning on satellite imagery.