Abu Dhabi nature technology company Nabat has been named one of 10 winners of the World Economic Forum UpLink Scaling Land Restoration Challenge. Its AI platform, NabatOS, links ecosystem assessment, restoration, and monitoring so that projects are judged by what survives rather than what gets planted. The recognition comes as investors and governments look for restoration outcomes they can verify. 

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Nabat, a nature technology company based in Abu Dhabi, has been selected as one of 10 winners of the Scaling Land Restoration Challenge run by UpLink, the World Economic Forum's innovation platform, and named an UpLink Venture. The company's pitch rests on a simple and slightly contrarian idea. Before anyone plants anything, find out whether planting is needed at all. 

Why So Many Land Restoration Projects Fail 

In the Philippines, volunteers once planted more than a million mangrove saplings in a single hour, setting a world record. When the British mangrove researcher Dominic Wodehouse later visited the site, he found almost nothing left apart from a patch of roughly 20,000 trees near a river. It was discovered that the mudflat had been the wrong place to plant from the start, and that is the problem Nabat is built around. 

Programs have long been funded and reported by the number of seedlings put in the ground or hectares covered, because those figures are easy to count and easy to announce. In a survey of 119 mangrove projects across Thailand and the Philippines, Wodehouse and his colleagues found that about a third took place on mudflats, where average survival was 1.4 percent. Across the Philippines, fewer than 20 percent of planted mangroves typically survive. Nabat, citing published research and Global Mangrove Alliance guidance, puts the failure rate for mangrove restoration projects at around 80 percent. 

UpLink says up to 40 percent of the world's land is degraded, threatening ecosystems that underpin half of global GDP, with potential losses of $23 trillion by 2050 if the trend continues. Restoration faces an estimated $278 billion annual funding gap, and private capital supplies only about 6 percent of current funding. Drylands alone account for roughly a billion degraded hectares, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. 

The challenge, backed by the commodities group Mercuria, set out to find ventures that can make land restoration commercially viable while delivering measurable outcomes. 

What NabatOS Does 

Nabat describes NabatOS as an operating system for nature. In practice, it pulls satellite, aerial, and field data into one workflow covering site assessment, restoration design, seeding, and long-term monitoring. It runs on Ether, a proprietary geospatial AI foundation model the company built for the purpose. In the field, Nabat uses drones and autonomous seed dispersal instead of crews planting by hand. 

Decisions about where to intervene, what to do, and whether an ecosystem is recovering are usually spread across different consultants, datasets, and contractors. According to Nabat, this fragmentation pushes organizations to act before they understand a site, including cases where the ecosystem would recover better if left alone. 

Mehdi Ajana, Vice President of Strategy and Growth at Nabat, describes the approach: “For restoration, that means moving beyond ‘plant and hope’ - knowing where to act, when not to act, and measuring success by what survives and whether ecosystem function returns. Being selected as an UpLink Venture by the World Economic Forum is meaningful recognition of that approach - and of the opportunity to take it much further.” 

Nabat cites manual restoration costs of around $10,000 per hectare, compared with less than $3,000 for technology-enabled approaches.  

A Testbed on the Abu Dhabi Coastline 

Nabat was launched in December 2024 by VentureOne, the commercialization arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council, and signed a partnership that month with the Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi under the emirate's mangrove initiative. Since then, it has assessed environmental conditions across more than 14,000 hectares of coastline and started restoration on more than 2,000 hectares, tracking seed establishment, ecosystem health, and biodiversity to check whether ecological function is returning. Assessing seven times more land than it restores is consistent with the company's claim that knowing when to hold back is part of the job. 

Reda Nidhakou, CEO of Nabat, links that restraint to a broader view of technology: “Nature is our most essential infrastructure - it gives us food, water, climate stability and the living systems that make life possible. At Nabat, we believe AI and technology should be used for good: to help us understand nature better, make wiser decisions and protect its ability to do what it was created to do.” 

The company now plans to expand across the Gulf and into Southeast Asia, where coastal and dryland ecosystems face similar pressure and where many of the failed mangrove plantings of recent decades took place. 

What Comes Next for Nabat and Nature Technology 

The UAE has pledged to plant 100 million mangroves by 2030, and the Saudi Green Initiative aims to plant 10 billion trees across the kingdom. Tools that can tell a government which sites will hold become more valuable as the numbers grow. 

Southeast Asia, Nabat's other target market, holds some of the world's largest mangrove forests and has seen many of the failed plantings that researchers now cite as warnings. 

However,  Nabat's 14,000 hectares is meaningful but small against a billion degraded hectares of drylands, and much of its track record so far comes from one government partner in one emirate. AI-driven monitoring is only as credible as the field data used to validate it.  

As corporations, lenders, and governments face growing pressure to show that nature spending produces results, value in restoration is moving from the act of planting to the evidence that something grew. As an UpLink Venture, Nabat will work with governments, landowners, corporations, scientists, and capital providers looking for credible ways to conserve and restore nature at scale. The fullest verdict on its approach will come from the monitoring data on sites seeded today, several years from now. 

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