Beyond the Bottom Line: A Conversation with Narayan Iyer at the Asian Development Bank
On food systems and natural capital in the Asia-Pacific region. Edited from an interview by NatCap intern Anastazja Krostenko.
Last week at the 2026 Asia and the Pacific Food Systems Transformation Forum in Manila, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced a plan to mobilize $40 billion by 2030 for more resilient and sustainable food systems. ADB President Masato Kanda emphasized that this "transformed agenda" is designed to reach 62 million farmers and ensure food systems that simultaneously “nourish people, protect nature, and generate inclusive rural growth.” With recent floods in 2022 and 2023 across Pakistan and India causing massive loss of life and billions in economic damages, and droughts that have crippled food production in Central Asia threatening to push millions back into extreme poverty, the links between sustaining natural ecosystems and food security are top of mind.
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.