Nature Finance Focus

The private sector’s relationship with nature has undergone a long journey across the past fifty years. Initially, nature was simply seen as a resource to be largely exploited and enable economic growth and not an integral part of the economic system, despite the increasing role for conservation and preservation. However, over time we have begun to understand nature as a foundational presence for our economic and social lives, and alongside this, a great opportunity to improve them. Nature is an opportunity we’re all growing into. As the critical role that nature plays comes into focus capital providers have become increasingly engaged in thinking about the natural world. This is in part because material stakeholders such as regulators and consumers have begun to move on the topic, prompting economies into the beginning of transition pathways which will play out over decades. These pathways create significant economic risks, but also create sizable opportunities for growth and for the creation of more effective economic models. Alongside this structural change, capital market actors are also being urged by a growing set of material stakeholders to deepen their understanding of their relationship with the natural world. While this recent growing recognition of the intersection of nature and capital markets may seem sudden, it actually represents a maturing of understanding as to what is required to build truly sustainable economies. Without this ability to fully integrate the role of nature that we are setting out to build today, we have little chance of reaching an economic model that is viable long term and can provide for our civilization today and in the future. In this report we set out to improve our understanding of how this effort is affecting capital market participants.