In practice, this means FinBio’s research institutions and academic partners work directly with the venture capital community, large institutional investors, asset owners, and asset managers. This has enabled FinBio to understand what information about nature and nature loss a company needs, not only for reporting purposes, but also their long-term planning and investment strategies.

Megan Meacham is the NatCap Director at SRC and the Program Manager and Lead Researcher at FinBio. She’s come away from the work so far with a clear-eyed understanding of what this kind of systemic change actually requires.

“At FinBio, we are thinking about a future in which finance doesn’t undermine nature, and thinking about how this would actually operate. To do that we have to build out a lot of different strategies, with relevance for different kinds of financial actors. In other words, we are thinking about finance for the future. I define finance as three activities: it lets us do daily things — trade, or buy things. It lets us do big things — big projects that need someone to take a loan out to do, or mobilize a lot of money. And it helps us deal with surprises, which right now means insurance.”

What Megan points out is that the financial system must always be able do those three things successfully, but there’s no reason the actual structure of the systems has to stay the way they are:

“There’s no reason for daily transactions to work the way we see them today, or loans to function the way they do today, or insurance the way we see it today to operate. So, really we are playing within those ideas, and imagining what new futures could look like.”

In this conversation, we discuss the specific tools FinBio is developing and what gaps remain when it comes to incentivizing the private sector. We take a stab at understanding how nature can be better valued and incorporated within the financial system writ large.

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Q: Let’s start with the basics. You work with the private sector. How do you frame nature-related risks for businesses, and why should businesses be paying attention right now?

What we’ve seen in the last 6 to 18 months is that there is no business as usual. Change is happening so quickly that instead of short-term versus long-term change, right now it’s more about gradual versus abrupt change – and this can be unpredictable and non-linear [i.e., steady changes can suddenly accelerate/be disrupted]. This matters a great deal to businesses who want to and need to anticipate change, who need to think about their supply chain, [to understand] how stable it is and what are the risk factors.

Those risk factors are often nature-related: declining productivity, natural disaster, social disruption, war, famine, things that people don’t always connect the dots back to nature on.

Imagine you’re a clothing company and you source cotton. The places you source cotton from are each year becoming more and more vulnerable. At some point, it’s going to be a very abrupt change to your company’s production if you suddenly can’t source that material anymore. This is true across sectors. While primary sectors [i.e., those involved in extracting raw materials] are directly dependent on ecosystem service production, nature is fundamental to the entire economy, which is driven by finance. And all of finance and industry [ultimately] depends on healthy people getting to work, drinking clean water, and existing in a place that’s not literally on fire. In other words, there isn’t an industry or person on Earth that wouldn’t be affected by ecosystem collapse.

Q: So given that framing, what is FinBio, and what are you trying to do?

FinBio focuses on a systemic approach to nature and finance. First, we need to understand, measure, and map how exactly nature is a foundational input to industry [which is the kind of information that ecosystem service assessments and accounting can help provide]. Nature and biodiversity are a complex system that fundamentally helps us maintain stability and predictability, [two factors] that businesses and finance depend on. So, first we have to have ways to measure and monitor changes to that natural system.

The second focus of FinBio is the financial system [itself]. Finance is not a single actor, but a system made up of different institutions with different roles that interact with and shape one another. Venture capital helps fund new ideas and early-stage firms that may not yet have an established market. Banks provide credit that allows successful ideas to grow and scale. Stock exchanges shape access to public capital by setting the rules for listing and disclosure. FinBio’s research shows that when one part of this system begins to reinforce sustainability practices, it can create conditions that enable other actors to do the same.

In this way, finance can either lock in unsustainable dynamics or help generate positive, self-reinforcing effects. FinBio’s aim is to show that nature, as a complex and stability-supporting system, underpins the economy, financial systems, and human well-being, and is therefore fundamental to the long-term resilience and functioning of finance itself. To do this FinBio is leading a wide ranging number of activities, including the development of a range of specific tools:

• INFORM — A science-based framework for investors to monitor and assess portfolio companies’ environmental performance. Read more about INFORM

  

• Earth System Impact (ESI) — A tool to better capture corporate and investment impacts on the Earth system. ESI focuses on just three corporate asset-level disclosures: water consumption, land use, and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions. Investors aiming to reduce their environmental impact can determine which earth system domains are most affected by a particular asset, and can improve targeted engagement by providing information on where corporate environmental impact mitigation strategies can have the most effect. Read more about ESI.

  

• Shock Tracker – The first global database of social-ecological shocks, accessible to academics and communities. Read more about Shock Tracker

  

Q: Is the private sector coming to FinBio looking for answers, or are you bringing this conversation to them?

It is a bit of both. FinBio works with private-sector partners, and those collaborations are important because they help us see where financial actors need support most. Across these interactions, and more broadly across the financial community, there is a growing awareness that the world is becoming more uncertain and less stable, and that decisions increasingly have to be made outside any familiar business-as-usual scenario. This makes a resilience perspective especially relevant. One of FinBio’s roles is to help clarify how nature supports the stability and functioning of economies and financial systems, and to translate biodiversity science into information that is more directly useful in financial decision-making. Often this means acting as a bridge between raw biodiversity data and the kinds of information decision-makers can use, including what changes in nature mean for ecosystem functions, economic activity, and long-term resilience.

Q: Can you walk us through some of the challenges?

One major challenge is that biodiversity is fundamentally different from climate change. Many companies are now relatively used to climate reporting and emissions-based metrics, but biodiversity is more context-specific and harder to reduce to a single number. It can refer to genetic diversity, species diversity, or ecosystem diversity, and each of these captures something different. Biodiversity loss is also highly place-based, so the loss of species or habitat in one landscape is not directly comparable to loss in another. As a result, it is much more difficult to create simple, standardized metrics or tradable units, and biodiversity requires more context-sensitive ways of being understood and integrated into decision-making.

A second challenge is that many financial institutions are still building the internal capacity to work with nature-related issues. There is often limited shared language, limited in-house ecological understanding, and limited access to the kinds of data needed to make these issues decision-useful. In practice, what matters is often not raw biodiversity data on its own, but what changes in nature mean for the functions nature provides, for economic activity, and for financial risk. That requires translation. It also often requires spatially explicit information, such as where assets, operations, or supply chains are located, and that kind of data is still missing for many companies and portfolios. So the challenge is not only scientific complexity, but also building the common language, capacity, and data foundations needed to make biodiversity and nature relevant in practice.

Q: What is the incentive for the private sector to engage at all?

The incentive for the private sector to engage is not only that regulation and reporting expectations are increasing, although that is clearly part of it. More fundamentally, companies depend on nature in many ways, whether through water, raw materials, soil fertility, pollination, stable landscapes, or broader ecosystem functioning. Understanding those dependencies helps them better assess operational, supply chain, physical, reputational, and financial risks. In that sense, engaging with nature is increasingly about understanding what underpins the functioning of the business itself.

Q: Is that where the INFORM tool comes in? Giving investors a way to actually understand that risk?

Yes, exactly. One of the key ways finance interacts with nature is through the companies it owns, lends to, insures, or otherwise supports. Financial actors are usually not managing land, extracting resources, or producing goods themselves, but they have significant influence over the companies in the real economy that are. That means finance has a very important lever to pull through engagement: asking better questions, setting clearer expectations, and using ownership or stewardship to encourage better practices.

INFORM is a tool that we started developing to address that need, after having conversations with a pension fund. Pension funds are interesting because they own the whole market, they own a little bit of everything – they are “so-called universal owners.” Because of this, when they decide something, it matters. If a pension fund decides to change how they include a certain sector or something, that can suddenly move a lot of money. At FinBio we had a person working at the pension fund come to us and say that they needed help talking to the companies they own shares of about nature, and wanted some basic questions to ask them. Their perspective was that the questions had to be something they understood, and then when they received an answer, they would need to know how to interpret the answer. So that’s how it started, as a response to a need.

Then, we distilled the main pressures on nature loss, which are reflected in the IPBES drivers of biodiversity loss: land use, invasive species, resource use, pollution etc. And we designed questions about the key environmental variables that you (owner of these many companies) should ask about.

At its core, INFORM is designed to help them assess three things:

1. where a company’s most material nature-related dependencies and impacts are

2. whether the company understands and manages those issues in a credible way

3. what that implies for engagement and follow-up as an investor or owner

Before tools like this, many actors were often relying on much thinner signals, such as whether a company mentioned biodiversity at all, or had posted a target. The goal of INFORM is to help build the nature-related capacity of both investors and companies by making the conversation more structured, more decision-useful, and more scientifically grounded.

Q: It seems deliberate that these questions are being driven from within the financial system itself, rather than imposed from outside.

Yes, it is important that the financial actors, in this case owner, use their agency and leverage in the system. Often in the piloting phase we don’t see what companies report, or the data. We’re there to give the questions, and to give them information about how to interpret the questions. In an ideal world, this kind of data would get published openly, but we’re not asking for that, that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there to build the competence and the capacity of everyone to understand what’s actually important about nature, especially given that companies are facing a lot of reporting criteria and requirements which can be very burdensome. There are lots of different reporting frameworks, and each has their own limitations and issues. A major challenge for companies is navigating all these different frameworks and knowing which one to use. We connect to those frameworks and highlight what is most critical and relevant from a scientifically grounded perspective.

Q: Speaking of reporting requirements, where is the pressure on businesses actually coming from?

The European Union has gone through a big process called the Omnibus. This basically laid out requirements for corporations, and laid out what needs to be included in their sustainability reporting. Though Omnibus got watered down and is not as strong as we would want it to be, it is what the EU passed, and marks an important step requiring nature related reporting from companies.

Q: Is reporting the primary focus of FinBio?

It’s a piece of it. FinBio is a broad research program that looks at different aspects of how biodiversity and nature connect to the economy and to financial decision-making in the real world. For example, we are also exploring whether it is possible to identify signals of reduced ecological resilience and map where those signals are emerging. That kind of work matters because companies and financial institutions need to know where their operations, assets, and supply chains are located if they want to understand whether they are exposed to nature-related risks such as ecological regime shifts or other forms of instability.

Another part of FinBio looks forward rather than only trying to improve existing practice. We are studying novel financial initiatives that connect nature and finance in ways that are not yet mainstream in how large financial institutions operate today, and asking what they might tell us about possible future directions for the financial system. This includes examining diverse “finance for nature” initiatives, from market-based models to more community-led and alternative approaches, and comparing the different theories of change and values behind them. That work shows that there is not just one way finance can engage with nature, and that different actors in the financial system have different levers, different information needs, and different opportunities to support change. In that sense, FinBio takes a systems approach: we are interested not only in what companies report, but in how financial actors interact, what kinds of nature-related information are useful in different decision contexts, and what a more nature-aware financial system might look like in the future.

It’s exciting because there are so many people who now recognize that the current financial system, which drives nature loss, simply will not be able to continue to exist in the same way it looks today. And at [FinBio] we are trying to help envision what those different financial systems could actually look like.

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For more on Megan’s story, read this January 2025 Q&A on the NatCap website. Outside of FinBio, Megan is also involved in a women-led investment company, RadCap Ventures, which is investing in early-stage startups. So even outside of work, Megan seems to keep finding my way back to finance! She says,

“It’s another example of how questions around capital, opportunity, and who gets supported can really shape the kinds of futures we end up creating.”

• FinBio’s 2022-2025 Progress Report

• IPBES Business & Biodiversity Assessment

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As ADB Senior Director of the Agriculture, Food, Nature, and Rural Development Sector Office, Qingfeng Zhang noted:

“Asia and the Pacific’s food story has always been a water story... we must treat rivers as economic assets and manage and restore landscapes as living systems.”

This sentiment was echoed at the forum by Bhutan’s Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay, who argued that glacier-fed headwaters are the foundation of Asia’s agricultural economies, and these investments are, in fact, bankable. As he reflected:

“Natural capital is real capital—yet it remains systematically undervalued, under-financed, and under-incentivized.”

This emphasis on natural capital within the ADB framework is part of a broader structural shift and evolution across many multilateral development banks (MDBs) around the world, which signed a 2021 agreement to mainstream nature-focused actions and biodiversity into their policies, investment portfolios, and operational strategies.

This transition, from a pure risk perspective, makes sense. Unlike commercial banks or hedge funds, which may seek profits within months or even milliseconds, MDBs operate on 20- to 25-year horizons. And because they are backed by multiple governments, they have been uniquely positioned to treat climate stability and nature as global public goods. Understanding how a degraded (or restored) landscape could impact the repayment capacity of a loan, for example, is not only a financial imperative but also a vital safeguard for the people and ecosystems these investments address. Natural Capital assessments, accounting, and the biophysical valuation of ecosystem services are important foundations for these decisions.

As a Principal Natural Resources and Agriculture Specialist at the ADB, Narayan Iyer leads ADB’s Natural Capital Lab. With a background in wholesale banking, he is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between ecological assets and traditional financial markets – a gap that is shrinking. In the following conversation with Anastazja Krostenko, Iyer discusses the critical role of partnerships; NatCap’s recent collaborations with ADB in the Philippines; what it really takes to embed ecological data into financial commitments; and how the goal of treating ecosystem health as an “economic imperative” is the only way to secure the region’s future. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Q: How would you describe your personal and professional identity?

A: I’m an engineer by education and I hold an MBA. I grew up in India, and I currently live in Manila. What has always marked my life is curiosity. In my career, I’ve seen various aspects of wholesale banking [i.e., serving large clients like governments, corporations, and investment firms] and financial services, ranging from equities to credits to corporate banking, to investment banking, and now development finance. It’s been a fairly diverse spectrum of financing.

Q: Briefly tell me about your role with the ADB.

A: The ADB focuses on the Asian and the Pacific region. We service both governments and the private sector under the same entity, providing catalytic loans, technical assistance, and other support for sustainable development. You can also look at ADB along sectors, and I work in one of our seven sectors: agriculture, food, nature, and rural development.

Within this sector, I work in what we call the “front office” which is a strategy and coordination group. We look for trends, for things that drive development needs in that sector. We try to use that information to develop our strategy and approach to, ultimately, inform projects that support the bank’s member countries.

Within the “front office” we also do special projects in pursuit of various strategic initiatives within the bank. And in those special projects, I focus a lot of my work on nature. So I lead, within ADB, what we call a “natural capital lab,” through which I work a lot with the NatCap team at Stanford.

Q: What was your inspiration for getting involved in sustainability and natural capital?

A: It was just serendipity. My manager was overseeing two particular departments, one was agriculture and the other was environment. A lot of work at the intersection of the two came my way. I’ve always been interested in nature, but not from a work point of view.

The idea of applying scientific methodologies to something that I considered as abstract as nature very appealing. I come from a background of equities so I was very familiar with valuation. Applying natural capital valuation techniques, learning how to value something very different, such as nature, was appealing. In valuing an ecosystem and the services that it provides, I could see a lot of parallels with the valuation methods I was already aware of.

[Natural capital] made a lot of sense to me. I see possibilities for a lot more work to be done in this field, this keeps my interest going.

Q: Tell me briefly about how you in your role at the Bank interface with NatCap.

A: We are trying to mainstream assessments of ecosystems and their benefits within ADB. This means utilizing these methods in (our) projects.

Here in the Philippines, we are trying to employ nature-based solutions in some of our river basins. It's a large and exciting project [learn more about the 3Ps work in the Philippines!] in part because if you're successful in adding value to the project through natural capital assessments, that could go a long way in helping the mainstreaming effort. There is also interest from different countries to know more about natural capital approaches and maybe to employ assessments in projects there. I think we are riding a fairly good curve here, and I feel that in five years, a lot of projects will be informed by these assessments.

Q: How have you seen the relationship between NatCap and the ADB grow?

A: Some of the NatCap team was here in Manila this month for the forum that we organized. We’ve been coming to Stanford every year for the NatCap Symposium. And of course, we have weekly calls, which keep the momentum up.

We try a lot of things together, not all of them work out. But the engagement has progressed, to the extent that even if something doesn’t work out, we gather ourselves and move on to the next attempt. There’s a degree of comfort and we know what to expect with each other.

It’s not very easy to institutionalize relationships. I’ve done client management—which is actually managing relationships—for many, many years across different aspects of wholesale banking. And I can tell you that mostly relationships are between individuals, and the organizations benefit. So, when individuals move, the relationships between the organizations are hugely at risk. And often if the individuals move to competing or similar organizations, the relationships also move. So institutionalizing relations is very important but challenging. In many ways, from an organization’s point of view, that should be the objective. So how do you institutionalize it? Mainly through organized frameworks of engagement and multiple touchpoints. We have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) between our organizations, and we’re trying to get more people within ADB engaged with the NatCap work.

Q: Are there any kernels of wisdom that you found that allow long-term organizational relationships to persevere?

A: From a long-term relationship perspective, if you can’t secure a contract, that's not good, because then it all boils down to individuals. That's always a risk. But institutionalizing a method like natural capital assessments, that's probably a little easier, in the sense that if we do enough projects which demonstrate value, then natural capital gets embedded in the methodologies, and then that is what gets institutionalized.

Q: Tell me about ADB’s ‘technical assistance program’ developed for natural capital approaches and its genesis.

A: We have hundreds of technical assistance projects, literally hundreds. These are projects under which multiple activities are defined, usually around one common theme. We have a natural capital technical assistance project that we got approved late last year whose objective is to encourage natural capital approaches and investment across the region. We have multiple technical assistance projects that touch natural capital themes, but this one is completely dedicated to natural capital. This technical assistance project was also started in conjunction with the new natural capital approach we're trying to embed. The work that we have done in the 3Ps project along with NatCap has played an important role in informing our new approach by demonstrating the potential of upstream assessments in project design.

Q: How do natural capital approaches help you “translate” the value of nature into the financial terms, and then how does that affect the activities of the bank?

A: We have this new approach to designing and implementing projects with strong natural capital elements. We actually launched this approach during the recent Asia and the Pacific Food Systems Forum 2026. The first pillar of this approach is to do natural capital assessments. So we are trying to embed assessments in our approach.

Building off of our work in 2025, we then announced this new approach to transforming food systems in Asia and the Pacific, and we committed to invest $40 billion until 2030 to support this transformation, with natural capital as one of the five pillars of this approach. The forum covered food systems, ranging from agriculture value chains to infrastructure and agriculture, to nutrition, to country-specific sessions, and deep dives into how to transform food systems within specific countries.

Read more in the recently published guidance note from ADB which focuses on exactly how the tools of the natural capital framework can be embedded into the (strategy and planning), midstream (programming and enabling policy and regulations), and downstream (investment and technical assistance) stages of the ADB investment cycle.

Related news & further reading:

https://naturalcapitalalliance.stanford.edu/news/five-countries-five-ways-nature-supports-people

ADB news release and related articles:

(1) “Clean and Healthy Rivers Are the Key to Transformation of Asia’s Food Systems | Asian Development Blog.” n.d. Accessed March 24, 2026. https://blogs.adb.org/blog/clean-and-healthy-rivers-are-key-transformation-asia-s-food-systems.

(2) Bank, Asian Development. 2026. “ADB Surpasses $14 Billion Food Security Commitment, Expands Food System Support.” Text. Asian Development Bank, March 17. https://www.adb.org/news/adb-surpasses-14-billion-food-security-commitment-expands-food-system-support.

(3) https://www.adb.org/documents/guidance-note-natural-capital

The Natural Capital Alliance’s current core members in addition to Stanford are the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota’s NatCap TEEMs, WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and Natural Capital Insights.

NatCap’s global hub at Stanford University is part of the Woods Institute for the Environment within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and the Department of Biology within Stanford’s School of Humanities & Sciences.

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They aren’t wrong – we should be stunned by the sheer scale of destruction. Yet in a crisis-saturated world, the magnitude of such numbers no longer necessarily shocks us, or prompts action.

Refreshingly, the major report these recent headlines point us to actually does not suggest a strategy designed to jolt executives into action by implying their value chains are teetering on the edge of oblivion, or reprimand patterns of overconsumption with slap after slap on the wrist. Approved by more than 150 governments, the “Business and Biodiversity” report—launched February 9 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent global body that assesses the state of biodiversity and ecosystem services for policymakers, offers a new set of key takeaways that, for once, do not sound like a broken record, or Groundhog Day.

The report says plainly: biodiversity loss is, and will continue to be, central to managing risk across the whole of the economy and throughout our societies. Then, it provides a systematic body of evidence, along with 100 specific actions to measure and respond to business impacts and dependencies on nature on every scale.

Perhaps the most compelling piece of the report is how directly it names why the current disconnect remains so strong: scientific literature is not often written for a business audience. Businesses currently spend more time trying to decipher competing frameworks for compliance and reporting than taking meaningful action. And the structure of quarterly earnings pressures, short investment horizons, performance benchmarking, and reporting cycles don’t necessarily align with ecological cycles.

“We are moving the conversation from voluntary sustainability pledges to a science-based roadmap for system change,” reflected Professor Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the assessment and a NatCap leader based at the University of Minnesota’s NatCap TEEMs. (Media Release: IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment) To learn more about what this “roadmap” entails, I spoke over Zoom with the co-executive director of the Stanford-based Natural Capital Alliance, Lisa Mandle, a coordinating lead author and co-author of Chapter 3 on Impact, shortly after the IPBES plenary session concluded. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed key themes of the report, and why coordinated action by governments, civil society, financial actors, and businesses is essential for moving forward.

Q: What’s your 2 minute spiel about why the IPBES report matters?

A: The report really has a few key findings. One is that it continues to document the challenges the world faces with declines in biodiversity and nature, and outlines the role that businesses play — how they all impact and depend on nature. Then, it says….okay what can or should we do with that understanding? What can businesses do, but also governments and civil society and other groups, to bring better alignment between what is good for business and what is good for nature and society.

Q: What makes this report important or differentiates it from other studies that might have looked at these links between nature and business before?

A: What’s new about this report is that it synthesizes the evidence on the linkages between nature and business, it is backed by a global group of experts, and then endorsed or approved by the over 150 country governments. It’s a strong roadmap.

Q: Can you give us an example of how a business might depend on biodiversity or nature?

A: Yeah, there’s a range of the degree for how direct that dependence is. So, a farmer is going to depend on nature in some very direct ways, in terms of soil health, potentially pollination for the crop that’s growing, the diversity of the crop species in general. But all businesses do depend on nature. Sometimes, it’s through the value chain, but it’s also in terms of the regulating benefits of nature. Take your local coffee shop. That coffee shop is going to depend on biodiversity in part for the coffee that it serves, the pollinators that contribute to the coffee, and the clean water it needs to make coffee.

This was really made clear a couple months ago when here in the Bay Area there were really big king tides. Nature is also going to protect that coffee shop, potentially, from flooding or from other sorts of natural disasters: for example, by absorbing stormwater, so that the coffee shop itself doesn’t flood, or that the roads that serve it don’t flood so that customers can access it, or the suppliers can access that shop. So there’s a whole range of ways in which businesses really depend on nature to be able to operate.

Q: If I was an executive, or somebody in the private sector, what is the key takeaway that I should be thinking about?

A: That there's something in here for almost any kind of business. Every business impacts and depends on nature. Some businesses are well aware of this, some are not. Depending on where a business is and its journey related to thinking about nature, starting with real evidence and a framework for thinking about what its impacts are – but also its dependencies – on nature can be a really useful starting point. The report provides a guide to thinking about what methods and approaches can be used.

It clearly shows that these impacts and dependencies on nature translate to real risks. Some of these risks are more direct for businesses, but also, long-term inaction poses systemic risks. We make clear how conditions in which businesses operate will change and impact their ability to continue to operate.

Q: How might a business choose the “best path” forward?

A: There’s been a proliferation of methods and metrics to use to measure both impacts and dependencies of businesses or other parts of society on nature. One thing that is clear is that there’s not just one way to measure impacts or dependencies on nature, and there’s not going to ever be just one metric, given the many dimensions of biodiversity and the many ways nature’s contributions to people or ecosystem services support people and support businesses.

What is new is that the report identifies a framework for thinking through what methods are going to be fit for purpose, given the kind of decision being made by the business.For example, businesses might be making very site-level decisions about their other operations, and the report lays out what kind of information they might need to draw on to be informed about the potential impact on/dependency on biodiversity or nature at that site.

But that same business or other kinds of businesses might also be making decisions on corporate strategy, or about portfolios, and those kinds of decisions need more wide-ranging information about nature across a larger geographic area, which requires a different set of approaches. We refer to those as top-down approaches. So modeling is one way to do this – it might be coarser information, but provides bigger, broader geographic coverage to kind of inform those kinds of decisions.

Q: At NatCap, we have one sort of tool and suite of ways to help decision-makers gather this information (InVEST). Could you talk a little bit about how NatCap fits into this puzzle?

A: Our InVEST software is a free, open-source geospatial software for mapping and quantifying values of nature across a range of ecosystem services. If we map the InVEST software onto the framework within the IPBES assessment, it would fit in as a spatial method that relies on top-down data. InVEST has been run globally, and across large regions. It could be run at a landscape or site level, but we often say it’s not meant for very detailed site-level information. So the report outlines when a tool like InVEST might be most useful for supporting your business, how it can help mapping understanding of impacts and dependencies (or determining investment strategies), whether it is at a high level to screen different sites that are under consideration, or to identify areas in a landscape that are hotspots for ecosystem services that a business might impact or depend on, or to compare options or track change in levels of ecosystem service provision over time.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you about this work over the past three years?

A: Yeah, one of the things that is clear from the report, which is something that I think is really useful to have articulated as clearly as it is, is that there are many things that businesses can do right now that are good for the business and good for nature. Yet, even direct actions that are both good for business and nature, under current conditions, are not going to be sufficient to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. There needs to be a change in these conditions. That’s what we call an enabling environment, the context in which business operates, and how to make that context one in which the incentives for business align with what is good for nature and for society. To get there, that’s not something that businesses can do alone. It’s going to take action by the government, by civil society, by financial actors as well.

Q: When you think about this report being published, what does success look like to you?

A: The report provides more than 100 different actions organized by different actors that, again, governments, civil society, businesses, and others can take to move towards an enabling environment. Our message is these don’t all have to happen at once, but we outline which actions can happen, and how this partly depends on the context: the kind of business, the government structure, etc really will shape what actions are most appropriate. Success, I think, looks like seeing the way that businesses talk about and act on their relationship to nature changing.

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By the Numbers – Key Statistics and Findings from the Report

• $1.18 trillion-$130.11 trillion: Growth of the global economy between 1820 and 2022 (in 2011 dollars).

• +100% vs -40%: Average per capita increase in human-produced capital since 1992, versus reduction in stocks of natural capital.

• $7.3 trillion: Global public and private finance flows in 2023 with directly negative impacts on nature, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion

• $220 billion: Global public and private finance flows directed in 2023 to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity.

• <1%: Publicly reporting companies that mention biodiversity impacts in their reports.

• 60%: Share of Indigenous lands globally threatened by industrial development.

• 25%: Share of Indigenous territories under high pressure from resource exploitation.

• At least 8: Number of countries (along with the European Union) in which central banks have analysed their financial institutions’ exposure to dependencies on biodiversity.

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IPBES (2026). Summary for Policymakers of the Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People. Jones M., Polasky S., Rueda X., Brooks S., Carter Ingram J., Egoh B. N., von Hase A., Kohsaka R., Kulak M., Leach K., Loyola R., Mandle L., Rodriguez-Osuna V., Schaafsma M. and Sonter L. J. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15369060

About IPBES: Often described as the “IPCC for biodiversity”, IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body comprising more than 150 member Governments. Established by Governments in 2012, it provides policymakers with objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as the tools and methods to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets. For more information about IPBES and its assessments visit www.ipbes.net3

On one hand, maps are powerful tools, precisely because of their ability to simplify vast amounts of information for specific purposes. In the context of natural capital and ecosystem services, what was once abstract takes on an element of physicality. Maps can facilitate comparison of alternatives, weigh trade-offs, visualize new ways of understanding, and help us navigate our relationship to a landscape. Either way, maps activate the imagination. Represented in this way, data does not merely inform; it frames the relationship between one thing and another.

A map can show how a city’s drinking water depends on forest management far upstream; or pinpoint exactly where mangrove restoration might strengthen coastal resilience by reducing storm-related vulnerability and avoiding costly damage; or how economic development in one location might impose ecological, economic, or social costs for communities or ecosystems elsewhere.

At its best, a map, model, or scenario can help aggregate spatially explicit information (i.e., specific to a location), turning those abstract ecological processes into relational stories and decision-relevant data. When it comes to using spatial information in decision-making, the challenge, then, doesn’t seem to be whether to map, but how. As Korzbyski reminds us, both the natural and human worlds are rich in detail and complexity. Decisions that radiate outward from a static map can alter (for better or worse) the very “territory” they hope to represent.

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To explore this, I sat down with two of our senior GIS analysts at the Stanford-based Natural Capital Alliance, Jesse A. Goldstein and Stacie Wolny, to learn more about their process. They are expert data analysts who routinely use (and support others in using) our open-source modeling and mapping software, InVEST.

Wolny, a matter‑of‑fact East Coaster (who moved to California many years ago) with little patience for pretense, came to ecosystem services modeling after years in what she described as “hardcore computer jobs at hardcore computer companies.” Goldstein, an avid skier and outdoor educator, arrived by way of a decade of hands-on fieldwork in remote landscapes. Both Wolny and Goldstein move easily between scales: in one breath, they describe the power of remote sensing and Earth-observation data; in the next, they dive into the specifics of a single ridge, a watershed boundary, or the effects of an eroding landscape on a local community.

It was clear in speaking with them that, while both are experts in the granularity of data crunching, they do not lose sight of the fundamentals of understanding and supporting the human relationship to land and the world. What follows is an edited excerpt of that exchange.

Q: How does your own relationship with place inform your use of GIS?

JG: Having an intimate connection to the landscape or seascape [we are analyzing] informs our ability to use GIS, and vice versa. These GIS tools are really powerful. They enable us to look at things over much broader areas in less time and synthesize or summarize ideas in a way that’s easier for us to process and draw conclusions from. But at the same time, there are some costs of separating us from that real environment. Though the map may be a static snapshot, [with] time and experience, people can learn to view each data point and understand that there’s a rich tapestry of lives and cultures and realities within that.

SW: We rarely work where we live, which is a bit tragic. One repercussion is that we sometimes have to parameterize [defining variables that reflect local conditions] our models without having seen what agriculture or forests look like in those places. We can get information online, and we always talk with partners and local experts, but it’s incredibly enlightening when we have the opportunity to walk through a watershed, hear local people describe the situation, and see how things actually work. That experience not only feels personally satisfying, it also makes for better analysis, so we try to do that as often as possible.

Q: How do you engage with communities and partners to inform these different ways of modeling work you do?

JG: It’s important that we don’t lose sight of that “old-school analog approach,” where we’re making sure we’re validating with the people who live and work in these places that what we’re considering is real for them and their experience.

[Participatory mapping is one way that we often engage communities directly. It helps us to identify the ecosystem services, beneficiaries (the people who benefit from the services), and changes over time that they have witnessed and cared about. These methods are particularly important for mapping cultural values, local knowledge, and services that are difficult to quantify using data alone.]

JG: I’m really listening to the language, the word choice they use… maybe multiple people value the same location for similar reasons, but they might describe how they take advantage of that resource differently. I’m also listening for: is that just a personal opinion, or is it a group or a certain community or a certain demographic that feels the same way about that place? Oftentimes you’ll hear them referring to family members or community members or colleagues who might also have input and you start to think about who else we should recruit and get information from.

SW: We often begin with very open-ended questions, like:

Where are the places that you do things in your life?

What are you worried about?

What are your hopes for the future?

What are your fears for the future?

And then people begin to draw things on maps that we did not know about, or wouldn’t know about necessarily from global or other data sets.

One good example is from western Belize. We did not realize how much pressure was coming [from] both over the border and internally in terms of agricultural encroachment and illegal gold mining in protected areas. But when we got there it was clearly on everybody’s mind. We did a community workshop and got these maps back, and on the maps, we were able to see [where] this concern about agricultural encroachment and gold mining was.

Then we digitized [in this case ‘digitizing’ means converting marks drawn on physical maps into digital data points for use in computer models] the community’s annotations and used that information to inform future scenario maps in our modeling. But we would not have known how important that was to people without actually listening to them talk.

Q: What is the next step after digitizing community input?

SW: In the case of Belize, we digitized the circles around the gold mining areas and the circles around the places where agriculture is encroaching. Most of our models involve using a “land use/land cover” map so that we know where the forests are, and where the agriculture is, and where the urban areas are. Often, our scenarios take the form of altering that land use map so we can envision different possibilities: what if there were more development? Or more restored forests?

I can then take that new digitized data about agricultural encroachment and add it to our land cover map. So now I have a scenario where everything else is the same, but a bunch of the forest has turned into agriculture. Then we run that through our model and compare the results to how things are now, and could be in the future, beginning to understand how that encroachment of agriculture might change our water supply or quality, or carbon storage, or whatever it is that we’re considering.

This second set of maps above shows three future scenarios that were created from the digitized community data (with a total of 25 hand-drawn maps). These scenario maps were used as inputs to several InVEST models to estimate the change in ecosystem services due to extensive agriculture, timber, or tourism expansion.

These scenarios are a typical output, where the creation of a set of land use and land cover maps includes a conservation-focused future, a development-focused future, and a middle path where development is allowed but informed by ecosystem protection and restoration. Once scenarios are created, they are analyzed using modeling or other geospatial methods, then compared with current conditions to estimate the changes in ecosystem service provisions under these different possible futures.

Another example from Belize below demonstrates how these types of exercises led to discussions about three possible futures for informing that nation’s coastal zone management plan.1

SW: This way of mapping is important because we can bring together biophysical, social, and other information. We can begin to see how they overlap, and say: here’s where people are benefiting, here’s where people are not, and who those people are. Some people understand this intuitively. When we talk with local people, they’ll say, “Yeah, those people over there are doing this,” or “They don’t have any trees on their street.” So the map becomes a tool to demonstrate this when we start talking to policymakers and decision-makers. Suddenly, they can also see this information visually and begin to understand where and who things are happening to.

Q: Historically, maps can carry a weighty history of colonialism and exclusion of people from resources. How do you see your work in relation to that history?

JG: Yeah, great question. My impression is, historically, depending on where you sit, maps have most of the time led to what I would consider negative consequences. They can be so powerful, compared to say, a data table. They’re synthesizing an enormous amount of information in a way that’s often easier for people to visualize certain relationships, like clustering and spillover effects of neighbors. But they are also massive simplifications of reality, and they involve a lot of artistic decisions.

We’re displaying data, whether quantitative, or qualitative data we collected from a community, and then we’re making choices to try to appeal to our audience. We want it to resonate with the appropriate audiences in a compelling way, but there are also certain elements of the story we’re choosing to highlight or not. That has really powerful effects. Traditionally, this has been used to displace and marginalize people by claiming land tenureship. So when I’m making maps, I’m always trying to be aware of that history. That these maps are going to be viewed by audiences that can interpret them in different ways. I want to be aware of who lives in those places. I think: what is the purpose of this map? Who is it for? Is it for some government that’s going to make a policy decision, and what are the potential effects?

Even though traditionally maps have often been leveraged for power and greed, you can flip that the other way too. They can be used to empower. [Also] we can’t expect everyone to have the same understanding about the benefits and limitations of maps the same way that Stacie and I are. That puts responsibility back on us to make sure what we’re putting out there isn’t likely to get misinterpreted or misused or leveraged in a way that can be hurtful to people or nature. But ultimately, we’re just crafting the tools, we’re not the ones wielding them. The same hammer can be used to create or destroy.

Q: Where do you find hope and purpose in your work ?

SW: I actually find it really unfortunate that the Natural Capital Alliance has to exist, because we should not have to go through everything we go through to remind people that we are utterly dependent upon the natural functioning of this planet. I take hope in the fact that everywhere I’ve been in the world, not only is it a total mess, but there also are people who are trying to do something about it.

There are people who understand the history and the culture, and are trying to find ways to reverse the tide of destruction and disconnection from our life support system. I gain some hope knowing that everywhere I’ve been, there are people who are trying to get this information into government planning policies and international development banks.

I also have hope because of the class I teach at Stanford. Everybody comes into the class understanding we are dependent on nature and asking to learn how to get this understanding into their area of study. The students are diverse, from the medical school, the business school, biologists, ecologists, and other multidisciplinary areas. People are realizing the need for incorporating nature, including educators and artists. I feel good that students are coming in with a fundamental understanding of that interdependence and the importance of turning things around. Cultivating ecological intelligence should be at the core of our entire education system.

It’s hard for students and myself to look at nature in a mechanistic, human-centric, digital point of view, especially when its value is so obvious in our lived experience. But then we also need to speak to people who only understand data, numbers, or monetary value, so then we have to go through the nitty-gritty: the data crunching, modeling, economic valuation, beneficiary analysis, and all the other jargon. It’s non-trivial to do all that. These are the weeds we have to get through in order to create the information that’s starting to change the tide within some of these organizations who have gotten really stuck in a disconnected modality.

JG: I still often get the question of whether it’s an academic exercise or more [practical], modeling ecosystem services, determining what values does nature really have?

Q: And is it? Simply an exercise?

JG: I meant this mostly rhetorically, but my motivation for mentioning it came from how surprised I often am that people are so disconnected from nature that they don’t even recognize that it has any value at all. Let alone that we’re utterly dependent upon it. A major prevailing perception remains that our lives and economy are suspended from nature or that we’ve evolved past it or engineered our way out of it. In many ways, putting values on nature is always an academic exercise to an extent, because, to me, of course nature is invaluable, priceless. But pricelessness is impractical and equates to valuelessness for most decision-makers. Thus, we work to provide convincing evidence demonstrating that nature over here [i.e., in this specific location] is worth at least this much to people over there [in some other specific location].

So, it always depends on context. We hope that our assessments and valuations are leveraged to inspire and inform decisions that lead to better outcomes for nature and people, and many of them do just that. But sometimes, they are simply published, or not even that, and they don’t influence change. And sometimes we don’t know that answer for a particular project because work can sit dormant for years before being rediscovered and used further down the road, or we’re not aware about how something we did may have impacted a policy or decision. That’s actually an area where we’re aiming to improve… monitoring and tracking the impact of our work longterm.

SW: Going back to “The map is not the territory”: that quote speaks to a lot of what we’ve been talking about. We make these maps, but the reality is much more complex. Those maps are two-dimensional, simplified, often created by analysts and scientists. When we think about maps [in the context of natural capital] we are also trying to think more about the territory under them, what’s really going on on the ground and then how future policies, climate, and development scenarios could then change it.

William “Bill” Ruckelshaus served as the first chief of the United States Environmental Protection (EPA) from its founding in 1970 through 1973, and then again from 1983 to early 1985. Mary Ruckelshaus has worked in over 70 countries, advancing the integration of nature into national and global policies. As executive director of the Natural Capital Project (now the Natural Capital Alliance), she helped lead the creation of Belize’s first Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan in Belize, and its innovative finance implementation plan.

When it comes to engaging stakeholders and policymakers to incorporate nature in decisions, the Ruckelshauses have each faced their moments of environmental, socio-political, and climatic crisis, leaving a legacy of foresight, pragmatism, and collaboration.

During the 1960s, decades of unchecked industrial and urban development led to deadly smog in cities, and rivers slick with pollution had a habit of catching on fire. It was largely W. Ruckelshaus and the newly minted agency EPA who helped implement sweeping new air and water standards to target “big polluters,” developing a powerful regulatory framework for passing and enforcing landmark legislation (notably the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act 1972).

The “legislative heyday” of the 1970s, combined with grassroots organizing and mobilized citizens, marked a transitional period that expanded the definition of ‘environmentalism’ and created new political opportunities. During his return to the EPA in 1983, Ruckelshaus advocated for a more “constructive” approach, writing in the 1983 EPA journal:

“Protecting human lives and our environment cannot be done in a vacuum, protection must be harmonized with other social goals, with goals involving our economy and the production of adequate energy...The issue today isn’t whether we are going to clean up, but how.”

His attempt to strike this balance of economic and ecological interests was simultaneously championed and vilified by partisans on both sides. Today, the question of “how” has been set in motion, with few people having navigated that evolution as deliberately as Mary. She has helped to pioneer what is now widely known as a natural capital approach, a way of analyzing and then acting upon the interdependent relationship between people, economies, and nature.

In some circles, natural capital and ecosystem services have been viewed with suspicion, seen as conceding to the same economic systems that had driven environmental degradation in the first place. However, Mary describes natural capital information as a process fundamentally concerned with “shining light on alternative futures,” providing evidence that allows the full costs and benefits of nature to be considered alongside conventional economic and social metrics in development decisions. The linchpin remains a simple but powerful idea: just because nature’s contributions have historically fallen outside formal markets does not mean they should be ignored in policy decisions or denied financial support. As she puts it:

“It’s a different way of doing what in the early days would have been called ‘conservation.’ It is still in our best interest to save, protect, and restore nature, but doing so through bridging different communities, including people and actors in governments, civil society, finance, and the private sector.”

I gave Mary a call to understand exactly how she learned to “make this case for nature” and how she helps others do the same. We talked on the phone as she crossed Puget Sound in her home state of Washington - the same place where she once worked alongside her father. The following Q & A is an abbreviated transcript from our conversation.

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Collaboration and “Letting People Spill Their Cup”

Q: What lessons - from your family or early collaborations - inform the way you lead natural capital initiatives throughout your career?

A: Before NatCap, I was lead scientist for a collaborative group called the Puget Sound Partnership. It represented such a big area, you know 16 county governments, 100 mayors, 21 Native American treaty tribes, federal government agencies like the EPA, NOAA, all the state natural resource agencies, civil society, a ton of NGOs. Hundreds of people were a part of this collaborative process with 16 big watersheds. I was working on the project together with my father, with the goal to develop watershed and nearshore marine recovery plans encompassing the needs of both ecosystems and people.

I remember so clearly watching my dad, alongside another environmental lawyer and a tribal leader named Billy Frank, set the agenda for these engagements. We’d meet once a month, with 300 people, and we’d have a pretty tight agenda. People were driving all up and down the west coast of Washington, sometimes taking ferries like I did today, so, you’re kind of watching your clock, and getting nervous like, okay, we’re starting at 9, but then people gotta go catch their ferry at 5, or they have to hit the freeway or whatever, because they’re farmers, or parents, and everyone’s working.

Then, various tribal elders from Puget Sound’s 21 treaty tribes would help start these meetings. The Pacific Northwest tribes have a different way of beginning a meeting—telling stories that meander through their history, and eventually come full circle to the purpose of the session. These introductions would just blow up our naively constructed agenda from the very beginning. Two hours in and we’re still not past the first step. Everyone is still introducing themselves. All of the non-tribal, you know, uptight Westerner-type people, we’d all be thinking, oh my god, now what? We have to completely redo the agenda, because we’d overly focused on how far, “behind we were.” But I know from talking to my dad about this, that this was one of his main lessons: you have to “begin by letting people spill their cup.” Let people say their piece. It’s the first step towards building trust.

Often, a lot of tension is then let out of the groups, everybody is much more willing to work together, because they feel respected. For the tribes it was simple: first, we need you to hear our story. And it really was their communities that became so critical in all the problem solving that we then were able to do, strategizing to come up with solutions that were designed with their extensive knowledge; actions would work for them. It’s a great lesson I’ve brought with me to NatCap.

Alternate Futures

Q: How do you balance the need for acceleration with a collaborative approach that can move slowly?

A: At NatCap we as an organization acknowledge up front that we are not the deciders. Our role is to bring information, to shine light, as we often say, on alternative futures. It is the people in the countries with whom we’re collaborating who pick the future they want, who know what the big sticking points are, they have to be the decision makers. A lot of places have been stung by being treated badly, by organizations kind of swooping in, thinking they have the answers, and then leaving. Often there’s no lasting benefit to the people in the country, so we have to show them that we mean it when we say all this.

When it comes to collaboration, I've just seen how ineffective one-sector-at-a-time, or one-stakeholder-group at a time kind of approaches can be. Maybe you get a project done, with a subset of stakeholders creating proposals with their priorities in it, and they did it pretty expeditiously. But then they come to a meeting, and they have to “sell it” and it often goes nowhere. There is just a big difference between speed and effective pacing.

Finding the Opening Sentence

Q: When you’re working with policymakers or finance ministers or the private sector to describe how nature matters for their work and agendas, how do you know where to start?

A: To me, a [key part] of what we’re trying to do especially when we’re working with new audiences like finance ministers, or businesses is to stop for a moment and ask yourself: what’s our opening sentence with this person? Because after that, it’s all the same message. It’s that people and nature’s futures are intertwined. We can’t live without each other. But what’s the pitch? That’s where you grab somebody or you lose them. Often, your new collaborator gives you that opener. In one of our early projects in Belize, the finance minister told us,

“I don’t know what nature-positive investments mean. I need people-positive investments. That’s my job.”

The way he said it was very powerful, and I’ll never forget that. It was like, oh yeah, of course, that’s just a different way to make the case for nature.

For example, finance ministers have recently shaped the message to their constituents in part as: Belize’s economy has been suffering because of COVID and because of its dependence on tourism. The reason tourists come is because of the beautiful natural resources that Belize has, and when these are lost the tourist economy suffers.

It is still that same core narrative, people and nature. Most people’s hearts are attached to natural world, but when it comes to practical decision-making: “I’m trying to run the government, I’m trying to balance the books for the country,” then you have to… take it a little bit more into your head, from your heart, and begin to give it credence, and specific quantifiable benefits.

That’s where it gets interesting and where natural capital comes in. For example, in Belize – I keep using this example because it was one of our earliest ones – everybody talked about nature so eloquently, but at that point communities didn’t necessarily have ways to articulate or demonstrate with evidence how the reliance on their natural systems might affect their job, or their economy. In many ways our job is to begin articulating a narrative that helps connect the dots.

Natural Capital Information in Action

Q: Earlier you mentioned the idea of alternate futures - can you share a concrete example where natural capital information directly informed a decision by illustrating different costs and benefits?

A: In Belize, about 15 years ago now, we had a community workshop with the government, civil society, and people from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) plus regional development finance institutions to share the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan we co-created, with the bottom line outcomes based on values in terms of both Belizean dollars and biophysical metrics they defined as things they care about.

It was one of the first cases where we showed that you could quantify nature’s benefits to people in different terms: pounds of lobster landed, or Belizean dollars at the market, avoided damage costs from hurricanes, or how many meters of beach erosion was avoided. These basic relevant results for people.

The IDB got really excited about this work, saw its general usefulness, and asked us to replicate the approach in the Bahamas. But the Bahamas had a very different cultural and governmental context. They were wary of central government, tired of overseas investment that was fickle coming and going, and facing more frequent severe hurricanes (Category 4 and 5). They were a lot more worried about their livelihoods and how to become economically self-sufficient, and they had so much natural resources to build on. Some of the traditional sectors (such as public works) were hesitant about our nature-based work, until a hurricane hit during our collaboration, and damages were highest exactly where our coastal vulnerability models predicted.

We’d done the same basic modeling we’d done in Belize: quantifying spatial values from coral reef, mangroves, and seagrasses. And completed a coastal vulnerability model across the island where we pinpointed the hot spots of vulnerability.

By chance, right after we finished our models for the island, these huge storms came in, and the damages were, by far, the worst in those areas that our models had predicted. In this case, it was this horrible disaster that became a galvanizing moment for the Bahamians. They just said, okay. This is real. We see the potential for even the most (simple) ranking models, where suddenly we are able to see where benefits from nature were providing the greatest value to people and property.

Then, they started working on legislation right then and there that incorporated this information into spatial development planning on Andros Island that used this new information related to coastal protection, lobster fishery, and tourism benefits. It was a moment in time that no one wanted or wished for, but it brought home how valuable those natural habitats are to their safety, and their lives and through the economy, and they saw potential in what could happen with reduced damage costs.

The Bahamas experience made clear that when natural capital is quantified and visualized, it can guide not just emergency responses but also inform proactive decisions - showing where investments in nature can reduce risk and protect livelihoods.

Resilience, Risk, and Return

Q: From the investor side - banks and others - how is natural capital information useful for proactive planning and investment decisions?

A: Both banks and governments realize the need to be much more proactive in their investments and policies. Banks are doing what they call ‘upstream’ natural capital evaluations and assessments in their lending. What this means is that they are starting to do these assessments themselves, and then they also support governments to conduct assessments to inform their upstream planning. Together they are evaluating: how can I reduce my risk? How can I maximize my benefits? How might this change if a country maintains intact habitats, or landscapes, or diversifies land use types…..you know, coastal habitats, forestry, ranching. So yeah, I think that’s one clear use: banks have become much more able to conduct preventative, proactive assessments for climate resilience and development, and that this theme of resilience is informing bank lending.

Resilience is now a guiding theme for investment. Private sector investors want due diligence and proof that their investments are low-risk, high-return. Development banks are increasingly supporting these blended finance partnerships. Businesses want to know if they’re going to invest in a new development plant somewhere, or in developing infrastructure, that the country has done due diligence, and that they can prove this investment in new infrastructure projects will be durable.

Integration across sectors is also key. In the past, a development bank might provide a government with a tourism-related loan, which was separate from an infrastructure or transport loan, separate from a fishery loan (they were siloed). But now they're much more thinking about the potential for integrated cross-sectoral loans. The IDB and the Asian Development Bank’s natural capital divisions are highly focused on the integration piece, and nature becomes one of those cross-cutting themes for resilience and planning.

Demand for these solutions is exploding, and we cannot (and should not) meet it alone. Empowering an expansive, positive vision of transformation for planetary stewardship and development reveals the incredible potential that emerges when we start to listen.