Using Natural Capital Understanding to Transform Finance and Policy Decisions at Scale | NatCap 2026

So, this next session is all about scaling. We heard a little bit about scaling in that first plenary. And now we're going to really dive in to talk more about scaling. So, this crowd is no stranger to the idea that the human enterprise both impacts and depends on nature. And also no stranger to the idea that a better understanding of the ways in which nature sustains and fulfills human life can target investments that can at the same time help both people and nature thrive together. As a community of practice, we've been working together with leaders of countries, companies, and communities, and also finance institutions to change systems and to change thinking. So, we're working together to create stories of success that can serve as inspiration for others. And also we're working together to create new pathways to do things differently. And people are doing that in their own geographies and their own contexts. But now we want to talk about how do we scale this up to fundamentally transform systems. So, this session brings together leaders from key institutions who've moved this field in real ways from ideas to implementation, who see the big picture and who are really making things happen. And they all give me great hope that we can and we are making a difference together to mainstream the values of nature into decisions to create a more sustainable future. So, it is my pleasure to introduce this esteemed panel. And our first speaker is Eileen Lee, the president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Eileen. >> [applause] [applause] >> Good morning, everyone. Um thank you to Stanford and the Natural Capital Alliance for hosting this symposium today. Uh it is wonderful to be here and a privilege to help open this plenary session on using natural capital understanding to transform finance and policy decisions at scale. I want to begin by offering my congratulations to the Natural Capital Alliance community. This gathering marks more than just another annual meeting. It's an important milestone. 20 years of work to change how the world understands nature, values nature, and makes decision with nature at its core. That's worth celebrating. The Natural Capital Project started 20 years ago to help bring the world around to the simple but powerful idea that nature is not outside the economy and it's not an externality. It's the foundation on which development, prosperity, resilience, and human well-being depend. And the Natural Capital Project was fueled by the recognition that for too long our systems of policy, planning, and finance have treated nature as if it were invisible or worse yet dispensable. It was built around a vision for transforming the system by nurturing partnerships that would help bridge knowledge to action, deploying practical, science-informed decision-ready tools to help governments, businesses, and communities make better choices for sustained prosperity. And the good news is that this community has demonstrated that this is more than just possible. When done right, it's inspirational. And I know the expert speakers who will me will be sharing case studies that will give us a window into what success looks like for mainstreaming natural capital into policy and finance. I'm looking forward to hearing those stories and learning from their experiences. I am not an expert, but I'm here today on behalf of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as a proud supporter of NatCap's work and to share our gratitude for what has been accomplished, but also to call on this community in this moment to recommit, to raise our collective ambition, and to consider how we might collaborate with even greater purpose towards driving change with speed and scale. Because the work represented in this room has never been more urgent nor more possible. Indeed, the Natural Capital Project's evolution into the Natural Capital Alliance reflects a recognition of this challenge and a commitment to activating a global network of partnerships aimed at systemic, large-scale change that we need. This means moving from individual projects to national work that takes a whole-of-government, economy-wide approach. It means moving from pilots to institutionalized practice, from isolated success stories to shared standards, common tools, and durable capacity. All of this is needed if we're going to integrate natural capital into the everyday machinery of development policy and finance. Indeed, that's the central challenge before us, not to simply protect nature as an exceptional demonstration project, but to transform the systems in ways that reinforce these decisions and make this understanding of natural capital not only feasible, but inevitable. So, as we enter today's conversation, I hope we'll consider three questions. What would it look like to meaningfully raise our ambition? How would we know that we had succeeded? And of course, maybe the most important question for this community, what are the ways that collaboration can help us realize that ambition? Let's turn to that first question. What would it look like to meaningfully raise our ambition for this next phase of work? What would it mean for natural capital to move from being evidence that decision-makers may consider to being a core part of the rules by which public and private capital is allocated? Can we go beyond making natural capital visible to making it consequential, consistently changing the choices about which infrastructure projects, which land use decisions proceed, which companies receive financing, and how risk is priced in and made something that's investable and manageable? And though we've achieved much through voluntary action, I also wonder whether we should be asking whether the conditions are ripe to begin moving from making natural capital a voluntary input to one that's a required input in decision-making. There's more momentum across sectors for this work than ever before. With TNFD giving regulators and firms a practical starting framework and target 15 of the global biodiversity framework articulating the aspiration for a policy vision where large corporations, financial institutions, and would be mandated to disclose biodiversity-related risks, dependencies, and impacts. What would it look like to fully realize this momentum? And then, if we were to achieve these aspirations, what would success look like? One measure would have to be to look at how harmful incentives begin to shift. The 2023 UNEP report estimated over 7 trillion in nature negative subsidies. A major test would be whether we can shift those flows towards nature positive investments. But I think we also have to imagine success in the form of natural capital solutions that are institutionalized and the province not just of environment ministers but finance ministers, ideally leading whole of government approaches. Today, our work often relies on individual champions, often those environment ministers, but our success stories show that the path to scale looks different when finance ministers and the whole of their governments are engaged. What makes that possible? Changing their cost of capital, creating investable assets that unlock private sector investment at a larger scale. How can we make the full adoption of these natural capital approaches an irresistible competitive advantage for these countries? And how do we then embed these practices into their institutions in ways that withstand political turnover? Finally, I'd like to turn to the third and maybe the most important question for this community, which is what are the significant ways that we can strengthen collaboration to realize these raised ambitions. And to start, I think maybe the logical extension of that question is what would it look like to collaborate not just around innovation of natural capital understanding, but in really working together to drive adoption. Innovation brought us a long way. It's given us the science, the models, the tools, and the proof points. But the next phase requires something different. It requires coalitions that can move natural capital from a technical feasible possibility to an institutional requirement. I think we have to ask whether it's time to have more convergence around standards that are allow for practical decision-ready methods. A persistent barrier to mandatory adoption has been the perception that natural capital methods can be complex, bespoke, or even contested. Collaboration can focus on making methods easier to use, easier to audit, and easier to integrate into existing decision processes. The question is not whether methods can be perfect, but whether they can be trusted enough to be incorporated into real policy and finance decisions. And a key element of this is building the shared data infrastructure that makes the capacity for action really accessible. Countries need permanent natural capital data systems, not just pilot reports. This means open geospatial data tools and other inputs, and the accelerating availability of AI-powered solutions can certainly help us translate existing tools into this capacity at even greater speed. And then, of course, considering how we collaborate across sectors to drive change at this greater scale. One thing that's particularly exciting about the natural capital alliance is that it's already a multi-stakeholder alliance spanning the public, private, and civil society sectors. This puts us in a position to connect the dots and come together to scale solutions. I'm particularly encouraged by the leadership of the MDBs in this community, many of whom I think we'll be hearing from shortly. MDBs occupy a unique position in the global system. They aren't just lenders, they are standard setters, they are conveners, and they shape the planning and policy choices of governments. They help determine which risks are visible, which benefits are counted, and which investments become bankable. Under the leadership of the MDBs and the alliance with the other sectors in this room, we can unlock system transformation by bringing the pieces together in a way that allows change to consistently scale up. Um in closing, as I was reflecting on the moment that we're in, navigating an era where public discourse around environmental issues can feel particularly fractious and polarized, I think it's easy to lose sight of how much we all hold in common. No one wants to live in a world with polluted air, dirty water, and barren earth. And everyone wants a world that's prosperous and secure. And yet, despite those tradeoffs, we find ourselves locked into systems that make bad choices, leaving our collective natural inheritance more depleted with each passing generation. It's frustrating because, as we'll see in this room, there's no shortage of innovations and solutions that show us that that brighter future is possible, but they do remain just tantalizingly out of reach unless we can find the collective action to unlock change at the speed and scale that's needed. When I look out at this community, I trust that you all have the ingredients to help us lead the way, and we're happy to be part of supporting the natural capital alliances efforts. Thank you. >> [applause] [applause] >> Thank you, Eileen. Next up, we have Gregory Watson, the chief of the biodiversity and natural capital unit at the Inter-American Development Bank. >> [applause] >> Hello. Thanks, everybody. It's really a pleasure to be here. Um Juan Pablo said kind of set me up very well, so I'm going to go into a bit more details um on some of the things he was mentioning because at the IDB, um you know, we're starting from a very clear premise. Biodiversity is not a side issue. It's natural, social, and economic infrastructure. And if we want to finance development in Latin America and the Caribbean, we have to finance the natural capital that makes it possible. And so, the question no longer is how much does it cost to protect nature? The question is how much of development and livelihoods becomes impossible when nature is lost? And so, that's why I don't want to just talk about pilots, but on the larger um question of how these pilots become systems. How natural capital moves from evidence to policy to finance and then impact at scale. And for us, that begins at the strategic level. For the first time, the IDB institutional strategy includes nature both as a vertical area for investment, but also a horizontal area for mainstreaming. And that's a shift from treating nature as a purely environmental issue to really recognizing it as an asset that countries use to advance their goals. From there, and I'm I'm going to kind of walk you through the how these things happen cuz I think that's important. We build internal architecture in MDBs. We have a thematic framework document and an action plan. The thematic framework document really is the analytical foundation. And the central theme is mainstreaming. And it's looking at challenges such as governance, looking at challenges such as pollution, looking at finance gaps. And then we have an action plan. That's the how are we going to do it? How is the team that I lead going to advance bringing biodiversity and natural capital into our operations? How is it going to generate country-specific knowledge? We're doing studies right now on repurposing agricultural subsidies to basically have positive impacts for nature as an example. How do we promote and mobilize resources towards biodiversity and natural capital? And in MDB, this all starts with our country strategies. And that's when we engage with the countries about as Juan Pablo said, what are their priorities? We do our team never sits down with a country and says, you have to do all of these things for nature. No, we say, what are you as a country trying to achieve? And then we say, well, have you thought that nature is very important here in providing these services? Or that there's a risk to nature here and that nature is providing these livelihoods and really making that kind of argument. So far, we've done this in 12 countries of the with this is a rolling process. And so, um we're integrating this in the country strategies. Cuz once you have the the country strategies, you create the operational model to actually do this. A dedicated unit, regional focal points in the countries themselves, thematic focal points who focus on nature-based solutions, who focus on capital markets, and work with those other sectors of the bank who are brothers and sisters in this work. And that allows us not only to work deeply with the countries, but transversally across the institution as a whole. And the institutional architecture matters. It sounds very dry because natural capital doesn't scale one project at a time. It needs to become part of the institutional um machinery, part of the policy priorities, uh part of the policy dialogue. And it becomes systematic when that natural capital is mainstreamed in the investment systems, the medium-term fiscal frameworks, debt sustainability analysis, national uh policies. So, that's a bit where we're going there. We see our action plan um developing results. Under the action plan, we've delivered 100% of our outputs. We've mobilized as Juan Pablo said, last year we did $1.8 billion of our portfolio was nature, that's about 10%. We mobilized an additional $750 million from external sources, not from donors, but from the markets. And we've worked with over 10,000 shareholders. So you show that you can actually do this when you put the systems in place. And the system depends on three inter-related pillars: policy, finance, and data. Policy creates the enabling conditions. Finance turns the ambition into investable structures, and data gives the governments and investors the confidence to act. So the first pillar is policy because it only changes when the fiscal managers in the ministries of finance, in the places where countries make decisions, incorporate these topics. Our role is to help the countries move step by step from looking at the evidence to bringing it to policy, from bringing it to policy to fiscal and planning systems, bringing that to the investment system. And in practice, we do that through policy-based lending, where we require policy change in order for a loan from the bank to be implemented. By look By providing advisory services, analytics, and combining that all together to make this kind of data useful in the context of a project. Um We also help countries design the fiscal and financial tools to make the agenda operational. Budget tagging, incentives, green finance taxonomies, sustainable finance frameworks. And we do that by bringing the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Environment together. We're moving from, you know, analytics to structured investments, buildable nature-positive pipelines of scale, and mobilize public and private finance through blended finance, through guarantees, through other instruments. And that's why ministries of finance are so critical. That's where the fiscal policy, the debt, the budgets, the public investment decisions come together. Our ministries of finance platform is a key entry point. Since 2022, it's creating a created a country-led space for policy dialogue, peer exchange, technical analytics, and implementation. It engages 17 countries. It's trained more than 185 officials, so not just the ministers, but the people who work in the ministries, and supported 23 fiscal initiatives. This is includes the analysis of macro-fiscal issues, debt sustainability analysis, you know, what is the cost of capital to a country if their natural resource base is degraded. That starts to get open really interesting conversations with policy makers. And they start to treat biodiversity as an economic asset that's not only important for their resilience, but also for their livelihoods. Then if we look at innovative and finance, the policy creates the conditions, finance turns those conditions into investment. We've mapped a range of innovative and not so innovative financial products. It's not just about doing the cool, you know, sexy new thing. It's also about applying kind of boring financial instruments in a new way. Um how can we mobilize this? The IDB is active across all of these different financing structures, but I'm going to focus a little bit on two. Um and this time the the two that I'm going to talk about are important because they create that DNA in the country between the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment. We were the first MDB to support a debt-for-nature swap um with a policy-based guarantee, and we've been involved in five of the 10 um last transactions since 2022 and all but one in Latin America and the Caribbean. That's mobilized more than $2 billion in private capital um for these operations. And the shift is that this becomes a part of the country's fiscal and investment strategy. Moving beyond the debt-for-nature swaps, we see paying for verified results, outcomes funds. Um we're doing this at different scales. At the continental level, we've created a Jaguar Impact Fund with Colombia that's working along the Jaguar Corridor that pays for results around KPIs for an umbrella species and landscapes. But we're moving now to link that with results-based bonds. So when you have investors that are willing to forego part of a coupon that can send it generate hot nature gains for a concrete project, usually philanthropy has to pay that result. But what if we issued biodiversity credits through habitat bank and those pay back the investors? It becomes a closed private system and you don't have to rely on philanthropy. But for any of this to work and as Eileen mentioned, we need to have harmonized metrics and guidance. We, on behalf of the other MDBs, worked to look at 700 different frameworks of metrics for nature, worked with investors like BNP Paribas, UBS, TNFD, ICMA, and we worked at NGOs, governments to say, "What is the critical path to pick the most important ones that investors understand and to use those as your KPIs?" So we published this at COP 30 and it's available for anybody who's a project developer to try to make this faster cuz we saw in our own projects doing it one at a time doesn't cut it. So just to kind of close get towards the closing here, we have a distinct role. We need to bring policy, finance, and data together to connect, to convene governments, to turn methodologies into usable systems, and to mobilize and de-risk financing. But we can't do it alone. It's when we work with partners like NatCap to bring the technical depth, the data, the credibility, to bring and then the governments bring the ownership and the policy capacity. Philanthropy and donors bring the catalytic capital. Private investors can bring the scale. So we can bring everybody together. Um we've tested this in a number of different pilots. I'm not going to go through all of them right now cuz there's going to be a session about this tomorrow. But through this partnership with I with De Geoff and Stanford, we've done this in five countries. Um but beyond that, what we've done is to develop a harmonized toolkit that anybody could use that builds off of the lessons of these um projects. And so I'm going to skip through um there's individual case studies for each of the countries. I urge you to come to the session tomorrow where the countries are going to be talking about what they're doing, cuz it's very interesting. But, I maybe I'll take 1 second here for Belize, cuz it touches something else that Eileen mentioned. Belize is maybe one of the more interesting ones, because it shows the full pathway. Belize pilot developed KPIs for blue economy, linking ecosystem health to socio-economic outcomes, a monitoring system and also a centralized dashboard that shows how all of this links to different sectors of the economy and jobs. And then beyond that pilot, that MRV system connects government agencies like coastal zone management, fisheries, and blue economy together. And that then allows you to both have adaptive policy, but also to think of new financial instruments that are built off of this dashboard and these metrics that you can you can report. So, I'm going to skip the rest of these case studies. I urge you to come to the to the event tomorrow. But, to scaling beyond these these cases. Um, we mentioned earlier we've developed a 20-hour self-paced free MOOC that translates all of these um methodologies to make natural capital approaches usable not just for an analysis, but for policy planning and investment decisions. It's built about these real these really country real country case studies and it's designed for scale. It's available on IDB Academy, our MOOC platform. And it's not just a training. It's for ministries of finance. It's for ministries of environment to turn knowledge into capacity. And then we've developed a scaling package, which is a set of practical tools, methodologies, and guidance that systematizes all of these pilots into replicable rapid um methodologies that any country can use. So, together it goes beyond the country experiences into how this replicates at scale. And so, I'm going to close here. What does this all add up to in the end? It means we move from understanding nature as something to measure to making that understanding um useful to transforming the systems that shape development decisions. It It natural capital moves through a new pathway. From science to strategy, from strategy to institutions, from institutions to dialogue, from country dialogue to pilots, from pilots to metrics, from metrics to finance, and finance to scale. That's what we need to turbocharge here, and that's where we need to go in 20 years, I'd say. Um we need to use nature to strengthen development. And it's not just to prove that nature matters. We The group here has achieved that. I think I think you can all give yourselves a hand because you have achieved really making it clear that nature matters. But then how do we bring it all together so that countries can plan, invest, finance, and grow? I think that's where we need to go next. Thanks. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Greg. One small correction, that session that he mentioned that we'll go into more detail on those cases is this afternoon. >> [laughter] >> Okay, next up we have Narayan Iyer, who is hopefully still awake. He's the principal natural resources and agricultural specialist at the Asian Development Bank. >> [laughter] [applause] >> And has a particularly bad case of jet lag. >> Thank you, Anne. Uh you were loud enough, actually, so I did wake up. Uh I think So yeah, I I think Anne has introduced me, and I Greg has done a really fantastic job in explaining what MDBs really do. Uh so what you're going to hear from me about ADB is probably you know, old wine in a new bottle. Uh and Greg has made my job pretty easy, so I'm I'm not going to show all the slides that I have. Uh and I'm going to focus really on what uh uh you know, the tweaks that ADB has been making uh which are relevant to our own Asia and the Pacific region uh to uh scale up natural capital approaches. So, as the plenary session, you know, says what are we trying to do to scale up these things? We've done pilots. We've been talking about this for a long time. Uh we've been engaging with uh countries. We've been engaging with uh our private sector clients on various issues around the natural capital. Uh and uh Greg mentioned those pilots that, you know, were done under the Jeff uh and five of those countries were uh were ADB countries. Uh so, how do we where do we go from here? So, that was what, you know, uh consumed our thinking, our energies uh for some time. Uh and uh what we thought is as MDBs are very, very good at systematically, you know, uh trying to do things, creating frameworks, creating uh you know, methodologies uh to do what we want to do. So, we have and Ching Fong, you know, in the previous plenary uh alluded to that uh we have uh uh you know, devised a framework which we call a natural capital guidance framework. Uh which we are uh kind of using to inform uh our efforts to scale up uh uh uh natural capital investments in the region. Uh so, if I can request whoever is uh moving the slides to go to slide four. Unless I'm doing it myself. >> [laughter] >> Uh one before this. Well, it won't be too long. Don't worry. So, uh I mean, we've had many, many such uh uh initiatives across different uh But what we felt and what was really relevant for us at this point in time for natural capital was to systematically figure out where we go from here. And this natural capital guidance note that that we have published 3 months ago looks at it as a matrix of pillars, four pillars that inform the different objectives and the different you know type components of this of this guidance. And the stages you know of typically project or operation cycles. So let me just you know explain this this this approach. What we're trying to do through this is you know rather than treat treat natural capital as one different kind of sector or topic we're trying to embed it across the entire investment cycle that we we usually have and I think Greg mentioned that as well in the in the in towards the end. So the if I go you know along the Y axis so at the upstream uh we're looking at the country level. We're looking at the country diagnostics. We're looking at country partnership strategies as as we call it at ADB. And we're using the tools and methodologies you know the counting, the assessments to inform these country partnership strategies. And through these you know we would also look at you know we have this whole approach landscape approach which I'll briefly talk about later. So we're trying to use this to also do landscape diagnostics. So at at a really you know larger level the midstream level supports policy dialogue, supports investment planning supports along with policy maybe the need for regulatory reforms. uh And and with this objective in mind you know this would support country studies, sector studies, project level assessments, uh, and take uh, and try to, you know, you include land use, uh, biodiversity calculations, and public investment planning, you know, all at the midstream level. Now, when we go to downstream, we are going further down, further, uh, narrowing it further, going further micro. Uh, [snorts] and use assessments to directly influence project design. Uh, and we have we actually we have some examples, uh, you know, which even our our our countries can talk about. Uh, [snorts] economic analysis, you know, building in safeguards analysis, monitoring, uh, so on and so forth. So, uh, looking at upstream, midstream, downstream is really looking at it at a very large scale and then narrowing down to, you know, project level. Now, [snorts] if you look at the pillars, the pillar one is all about the assessments leading to uh, uh, accounting maybe leading to valuations, uh, and using that to inform the work that we do at all three stages. Uh, so we are I mean, we've been working with the natural capital project for many years now. We've been fortunate to have their guidance and we're using those these models that have been developed uh, in our projects to to to help design better projects, uh, to help implement them as well. Uh, this pillar also supports our, you know, emphasis, as I mentioned, on landscape approaches. So, what we want to encourage is rather than look at different ecosystems, you know, separately, uh, we want to look at all ecosystems that matter in a particular region together as a landscape. Uh, and we're increasingly viewing river basins, uh, as as you know something that we would anchor our landscape approach around. Uh And river basins that you know extend right from source to sea if you may. So it would include coastal systems, it would include mountain systems, forests, anything that comes you know within that whole set of ecosystems. And we have different programs that we calling for different regions of of Asia and the Pacific. We have Ridge to Reef in South Asia. We have Resilient River Basin Initiative in Southeast. Uh we have Glacier to Farms in Central and West. These are all similar landscape approaches varying uh >> [snorts] >> you know tweaked for for the vagaries of of that particular region. Uh the second pillar focuses you know on financing >> [snorts] >> mobilizing investments. So using these assessments to to maybe uh >> [snorts] >> uh design projects that are more bankable identifying appropriate sources of revenue, sources of cash flows uh in project by demonstrating uh measurable [snorts] economic benefits. Uh and and and using that uh to you know to take to convince our clients as well uh on the need to go ahead with specific investments. The third pillar uh is enabling creating the enabling environment for natural capital. So we recognize that you know these technical tools, these innovative financing designs, these structures, they're not sufficient. So countries also need stronger institutions, better policies mm improved governance uh and regulatory frameworks. Uh so through through our various you know modalities, be them you know technical assistance or maybe policy-based loans or or results-based lending >> [snorts] >> uh you we want to support governments to achieving this you know enablers to create creating these environments where natural capital investments could be scaled up. And the fourth pillar focuses on >> [snorts] >> knowledge partnerships and capacity building. The reason, you know, why we are here as well. And why we are also proud to be a part of the natural capital alliance. Uh I mean, we as all of us recognize no one institution can do uh this on their own and and that's that's exactly why we're working together. Uh So, all this, you know, we would like to bring together the all the four pillars across all the three phases. Uh and try and scale up uh uh our investments in natural capital uh across the region. Let me stop here. Thank you. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Narayan. Next up, we have Eric Berglof, who's the chief economist at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. >> [applause] >> First of all, thank you. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for inviting us to to this um incredible family. I am I've been here once before. I was one of those who put up their hand. I've been here before. But what I think this is almost you know, I go to a lot of meetings, but I very rarely that you have this sense of of common purpose, uh the sense of warmth also for newcomers like myself and and my institution. So, I very much appreciate the the family that uh Gretchen and and her team have have produced. So, so we are indeed uh very much a newcomer. You heard from two institutions that have taken this, you know, through this whole journey and making it mainstreamed. And that's very much the journey that we are on and it's, you know, it's not trivial to to do get this done, but we are very committed. We have did we did it in climate. We committed that we would have more than 50% climate finance by 2025. We now have more than 70% climate finance. We actually the the the MDB with the highest share of climate finance. We took it through, you know, from thought leadership to projects to policy-based lending and, you know, that's exactly what we have to do now on on a nature as in nature as well. So, we started with thought leadership. So, it's we And last time I was here I had had a chance to present this idea of nature's infrastructure. Obviously, it's not a new idea, but you can imagine for an infrastructure investment bank to take that approach that's saying that nature is infrastructure. It's a fact the the most important infrastructure that sustains all economic activity and of course life itself in the end. So, this is something that is we think a a very meaningful um uh commitment. So, let me say a little bit about it. Well, I I'm going to say there are two kind of hurdles we have to overcome. So, one is about the paradigm and the other one is how do we get private capital into to this space and and I think that's uh our two very real challenges. So, let me see if I can get this going. Wonderful. So, so um Gag and Narayan talked, you know, about the transformational uh impact that once you start thinking about nature's infrastructure and you know, it's about um of course properly valuing nature. We have here a lot about this and it's about designing financial instruments that allow us to use that um that value and also maybe the data that allow that uh makes it possible to to design contracts and that is very fundamental for any uh a development institution. And but it's not cannot stop there and again Greg and Ariane talked about this. We need to get this into a development strategies of countries. We need to get it into investment plans of individual companies. What what we are saying, okay, this is a little bit empty words at this point, but I think it's something that, you know, when you get into this period of saying that let's look at nature first when we are identifying in investment needs or or or um uh rather uh infrastructure challenges, let's see what nature can do before you move into gray infrastructure. And when you look at gray infrastructure projects, look at how can you use nature along with gray infrastructure to to enhance and and often make cheaper actually. And of course as everyone realize, we need to look beyond individual projects. We need to invest on a landscape scale and that's where thinking again about nature as infrastructure is important and of course move beyond this safeguard approach that we are just want to make sure that we're not doing any damage. We want to look at the upside and that again I think is what nature's infrastructure helps us with and and nature's infrastructure gives us both this sense that we we want to invest in nature. We want to manage nature. We want to make nature more resilient. And it also brings us a lot of experience from infrastructure finance. It's about, you know, what type of instruments to use, how to think about particular investment challenges, and I'll give you a few examples later how I think this can be very productive. But but one of the features that we met and and for some of you this may seem how somehow primitive, but it's you know, something you know, nature there are no revenue flows and how do you um uh you know, it's it's it's great to think about this, but how do we get it really in practice? This is so far away from any policy makers thinking. So, what we said we would do a report we just launched on where the where the water flows and it looks at at um uh the thinking about nature's infrastructure in a very specific form because the the global water cycle what else can you say than it it is infrastructure? It Take the flying rivers, it it brings water pumps water up in the air, it conveys water, it it brings water down, it keeps systemic um uh temperatures, it keep it purifies water as as as water percolates through nature. So, uh So, and and you know, we need you need to think beyond rivers, lakes, and oceans. The the rainfall that comes in in in flying rivers is is the biggest source of a fresh water offered by essential land ecological systems. It's cross-border, it's cross watershed, it's about of course upwind deforestation, upstream conservation of forest impact, and downstream hydropower. So, investing in in nature preserves both blue and and green water. So, here is just what I have said about this pipe pipe the nature's infrastructure and the global water cycle. So, here's the flying rivers. This is work that was in is in the report. Dingu Gaohere has been leading that work and it really what we could do is what we could look at the flying rivers and establish you know, how much a country contributes to these flying rivers, how much it receives. And once you start thinking like that, it's not far-fetched to start thinking about you know, we are used to paying for water. How can we try to monetize these moisture flows. So, I just wanted to to spend one more moment on the nature's infrastructure and how it's based different from nature-based solutions because I think we all, you know, try to use nature-based solutions in in in specific investment contexts and so on. But for us, nature-based solution is about looking at the possibility using nature to address a particular challenge, while nature's infrastructure again is about thinking at the system level about thinking on you know, how can we combine a lot of nature-based solutions. How can we improve the operation of the ecosystem as a whole? And I we have a good example. We are working on a project in in Ulan Hot in Inner Mongolia. The policy makers, the local administration came to us and said, "We want to use part of a wetland to restore that to to manage floods." And we said, "Let's have a look at this using natural capital evaluation methodology." And when we came back to them and said, you know, look at the value that you know, you're you're bringing through this um uh wetland in terms of cross-pollination, in terms of carbon capture, water and air purification, and so on, recreation, then you should restore the whole wetland. And that's what they are intending to do now. And and I think that is sort of a good example of how you move from nature-based solutions to to nature as infrastructure. Um So, the other challenge is again to you know, a a local authority or a government can say that we we do internalize these values that that this wetland produces, but really to bring in scale to this, you need to bring in the private sector. And that was another pushback from some of our investment team saying, you know, you're going to distort our commitment to have 50% private finance by pushing nature. So, we wanted to show them, and we launched together with European Bank Reconstruction and Development and and and the Paulson Institute in Berlin a report on where we tried to apply this infrastructure terminology or contractual structures to different projects. And and really the idea here is just to instead of talking about built, talk about restore, and then it all falls into place, and you will meet some of these examples during the next couple of days here. Let me end with um our first real nature finance project that we took it to board last week. It's a an example of how you can bring in a private sector finance into um uh nature as infrastructure. So, we are on lending to two commercial banks in in the project that passed Uh, last week it to one uh, bank, a Chinese bank, a medium-sized by Chinese standards, but by global standards very, very big, maybe a top 10 in Europe or something like that. And and what we are committing to say, we only lend you this money, uh, you going to lend to nature's infrastructure projects. Uh, we get some, uh, concessional finance from, uh, Tencent and and NAFD to train the bankers to use, uh, taxonomy, which is a taxonomy that we have agreed as MDBs and also the, uh, Chinese Central Bank has now, uh, agreed on. And and they, so they apply this, uh, taxonomy, uh, on these, uh, subprojects and then, uh, we can very easily scale up this. I've seen this done in, you know, for energy efficiency, for women, uh, entrepreneurs and so on. You know, once one bank takes on this, it's going to, uh, very quickly scale up. And we have another uh, project in the pipeline, another Chinese bank that is doing this. Of course, what you need here is, uh, very much some kind of policy framework in the in, uh, at the bottom. And this is where the great work of on the gross ecological product that, uh, Professor Ouyang has been working on. That's now the basis for the eco compensation mechanism in, uh, in China. And that is raising, uh, the, um, the, uh, bankability of these, uh, subprojects in in this, uh, in this, uh, final project. So, um, let me summarize. So, the the, really the challenge is, you know, we we need to mobilize capital. We need to get, uh, private capital into this space as well. Uh, we think that viewing nature as infrastructure is is a very powerful way to to, uh, make this, uh, happen and and scale. We think that using this, uh, PPP for nature framework uh, coming from infrastructure finance will allow financial institutions also to come in to support nature capital nature's infrastructure. And finally we need we need the evaluation models. We need the policy alignment and regulation and and we need to use all these traditional risk mitigation instruments that they use in in infrastructure finance. So go back to that first slide I showed on the on the flying rivers. Just as a thought experiment assume that we could charge the tariffs. We would see and we show very clearly that emerging and developing economies are massive net contributors to these flying rivers. Imagine if we can charge or take it the other way. Imagine that countries that are the beneficiaries now, you know, you can see here the United States particularly the south and the east of United States are benefiting from the Amazon. If we could convince policy makers here that indeed this moisture is critical for their agriculture and not only for agriculture but for for so many sectors we they should be willing to invest in ensuring the resilience of the Amazon. Thank you very much. >> [applause] >> Thank you Eric. Next up we have Matthew Bardrick who is the senior economist at the internet senior economist international biodiversity and climate in the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs or Defra. >> [applause] >> Hi, and thanks to you first for having me present today amongst such esteemed fellow panelists. Um for the first past 10 years, I've worked as a senior economist focusing on how we integrate nature into policy and decision-making on UK's domestic environment goals. However, going right back, I often joke that I started my career selling thin air for a living. It wasn't quite thin air. I was actually involved in the sale of radio waves, the rights to use different frequency spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum. And we did that with auctions. Um and now for the economists in your room, that might sound incredibly interesting. Um but I don't think that was the most interesting thing that I learned there. If you'd gone back 30 years and told people that companies would one day pay billions of pounds for licenses to use invisible radio waves, and that investment would in turn turn completely transform how we live and work on the go, that would have sounded crazy. Certainly in the UK and many other countries around the world, the 3G spectrum auctions had companies making unprecedented investments in something that in the past they'd just been given for free. What fascinated me was not that the spectrum was valuable, we already knew that and the technology to use it was developing really rapidly. The really interesting part was how we managed to turn that potential straight off the bat into big investment. Telcos Telco companies invested billions, backed by their large institutional investors, because governments had created something much more important. They'd created confidence around the value through clear rights, trusted institutions, common standards, and regulatory certainty. And once that happened, investment scaled, markets developed, innovation accelerated, and technologies we have now seemed completely speculative and are a huge part of everyday life. Now, I won't progress profess that's the perfect segue, but I think natural capital's not that dissimilar to spectrum. Not because forests are like telco networks, or because wetlands are like mobile phones, but cuz we already know nature is valuable. And most people in this room will have settled that question years ago. The consensus is also ever growing. Increasingly through great work and collaboration between governments, academia, multilaterals on initiatives like the TFND, and demonstrated by the agreement of the IPBES biodiversity summary for policy makers, which has also been mentioned, which we're very happy to host um the agreement for in Manchester in February. I'm glad to say that businesses are also increasingly understanding it, too. So, as a policy maker, I have to ask myself, how do we transform the create or transform the institutions, standards, and the evidence to make the confidence that allows value to shape decisions and the investment at scale? How do we move from understanding nature's importance, the first goal of the natural capital alliance back in the day, to changing public spending decisions, changing development decisions, and changing investment decisions? In the UK, we've been at trying to transform how nature plays into our economy for quite a while. Institutionalize it into scale uh to involve the real economy in nature action. And you're certainly not looking at an economy transformed, quite far from it. An insight that I always try to stress is that in the UK we've come to realize that a whole suite of interventions over time is needed and it's really hard. Changes to the machinery of government, national accounts, economic appraisal, and how that can then feed into infrastructure decisions, business cases. How can people understand risk management differently and increasingly how can we have conversations about investment in finance? We've of course done a lot of this within government, but that as the IPBES transformational change assessment demonstrates, we need to work together across the economy to do this to ensure we're transitioning to a world where nature's role is properly recognized. In the UK, recognizing and demonstrating the value of nature continues to be really important. And we continue to evolve this picture both at a strategic and a program level. Our national level natural capital accounts, alongside our HM Treasury Green Book enabling a natural capital approach guidance, including its value data books, have been around for a while. These set out the value of our domestic environment to the economy and commit us to including them in public decision making as well as reducing the costs of for partners to do this. Also worth mentioning that the OECD are also looking to develop these international value factors as part of their current Innovate project if any of you are involved in that. Most recently we've also worked across government on a first of its kind nature security report, which is demonstrating international nature's role in our national security. As others have mentioned, this has brought new allies from across government and international and internationally as they understand that the risk for nature and not acting on threats, supports their own outcomes. But we've also been putting measures to set the foundations and confident confidence and sometimes compulsion for the rest of the economy and those in government to act whose primary concern isn't for nature. To do this, we've aimed to create confidence through commitments and provide metrics so people know that we will value nature investment and positive actions into the future. At strategic level, we've legislated. We've set some legally binding nature targets as part of our environment act. And the need that for us to have long-term plans to meet them in the form of our 25-year environment plan and five-yearly environment improvement plans that set out how to get us there. We've also committed ministers across government and public sector bodies to take due regard to a set of environmental principles and to improve biodiversity directly. We hope these give the confidence and as much certainty as we can that the path forward will not yo-yo with the changes in government. We've had a lot of different prime ministers recently. Um and more directly, we've legislated developers to provide net gain for biodiversity when building and work with academics and our delivery partners um to create metrics to govern that process. This requires them to value and replace habitat they once freely exploited. I'm also proud to say that we've worked together with international partners through the World Bank program on sustainability and other initiatives like UNDP BIOFIN to support other economies on this journey, too. But we recognize that there's still a lot of further work to send stronger signals through further regulatory levers, corporate disclosure standards, and other initiatives to grow unlock greater demand and provide confidence for investors and the rest of businesses. That's why we've been co-developing nature-positive pathways with the World Wildlife Fund, the Green Finance Institute, and leading businesses to set out the actions that key sectors need to take to support nature's recovery. The first three of these are the agrifood sector, water, and the built environment. We've also committed uh to increasing water industry investment uh through uh further legislative reforms. And the technology's failed. Um we're also working across government to improve corporate sustainability reporting both on the transition plans as I mentioned to provide the markets with credible, decision-useful information on how they should transition to net zero and and uh nature-positive. Um and we've also been working really closely with the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures Framework. Raising integrity of nature markets through high standards and clear governance is all governance is also vital for ensuring that trust and confidence. So we've sponsored the British Standards Institute to launch a suite of nature investment standards so that buyers and investors can be assured of the environmental integrity of nature projects and credits. And we're consulting on the next steps for voluntary and nature car uh nature markets. But we also know that businesses are looking the businesses looking to invest in nature projects need a financial return. They need to do this at scale and that's an often larger than some nature projects can supply. So, we've built the ability of over 130 local authorities, ENGOs, farmers, and land managers to become investment ready through our natural environment investment readiness fund, and local investment in natural capital program. Most interestingly, we've now invested 30 million in the new Big Nature Impact Fund, where we, as government, take on more of the financial risk, making it less risky for private private investors to get involved. The first close of this fund exceeded expectations, quite small still, with 64.6 million, but that was working towards a target of 120 million. And the investors were really diverse, from individuals, insurers, to impact investors, who'd never invested in nature assets before. So, in close, a lesson to take from both spectrum of my work on natural capital is that value alone won't just drive transformation, institutions do. So, as governments, we create frameworks and incentives, academics can help strengthen the evidence base, philanthropy can pioneer new approaches, businesses investors help scaling them, and our colleagues at MDBs occupy a uniquely important space to help countries move from promising projects to systematic change. The challenge is not to prove nature is valuable, but for us to build confidence in the institutions so that we can shape decisions at scale. Thanks. >> [applause] >> And finally, for this session, we have Mary Ruckleshaus, whose official title is senior fellow Natural Capital Alliance, but she's also the executive director emeritus um and uh architect of so much of what we've been able to do at the Natural Capital Project and Alliance. Thank you, Mary. >> [applause] >> Hi everyone. This is a great um great to see everybody, but it's also a great suite of speakers to follow um for today for what I want to share, which is these lessons from this group that you've heard about working together in 16 countries with three multilateral development banks, the IDB, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank and this Natural Capital Alliance in the room. And what we have learned, you've heard a little bit about this morning and you'll hear more about this afternoon and over the next couple of days. But I'll give you my punchline because the way I've been thinking about this project over the last 5 years is that we were really pushing how do you go from the idea that nature matters to people, which many more people, of course everyone in this room, but many more people around the world understand, and how do you use that knowledge in your heart and your head to drive changes in policy and changes in investment. And what I've come to decide is that we're basically this transformation we're building an immune system for for countries and governments in the world, and that immune system will then allow an immune response when a shock comes, when a disaster comes, when an opportunity arises. And that is what I'll tell you a little bit about what we've learned. What does that immune system look like in this portfolio that we've been working in over the last 5 years? And I'm going to use our friends from Belize as an example of one key component of this immune system is that you have to engage the dream team. So, the dream team in Belize is many people, but the honorable Beverly Wade is here. She's the CEO of the which is the the way that Belizeans call ministers of the Department of Blue Economy and Marine Conservation. And Beverly, we've worked with for over a decade. She's a visionary leader who comes from a fisheries background, so she's grounded in a very important economic sector in Belize, but she also has this intangible ability to listen and lead and be a diplomat among her colleagues in different sectors in Belize, which she now has to engage in her new leadership role where tourism and forestry and several other sectors are in inside her ministry. When we last started working with Beverly at the beginning of this 5-year project, she introduced us to uh this is Prime Minister Briceño, who was also the finance minister, and his colleague, Mr. Christopher Coy, and she brought us in to say we need to get the finance ministry at the heart of this work we're doing together to push Belize into the next generation of incorporating nature in its economy. And it's just one example out of many of what we learn when we speak to leaders in different sectors. So, Mr. Koi and Prime Minister Briceño said at the second slide, we had this beautiful presentation prepared. And we had a lot of language like nature positive and incorporating nature in decisions. And Mr. Koi said, "I need people positive. That's my job. My job as the finance minister and Mr. Briceño as the prime minister of this country, we need interventions in policy and finance that will help people." And of course in our engagements, people positive is part of this nature and ecosystem service and natural capital approach, but we weren't talking about it that way. So, without leaders like Beverly and Prime Minister Briceño and Mr. Koi from Finance Ministry, we would be speaking about these opportunities in the in not a very compelling way. As Eileen said, we want to make this irresistible for people and to do that we have to listen to the leaders who know their country best. So, this is the portfolio of countries. Again, you can come and hear about this more this afternoon. But looking at the different ways that these approaches can be accelerated around the globe and through the help, the crucial scaling roles that the multilateral development banks play, has really helped us lay out a road map for what's next. So, this is a slide maybe some of you have seen. I'm not going to walk through it. It just emphasizes how much work there is, technical and policy and social and economic, underlying all of this these efforts. So, you're trying to take nature's benefits to people and turn them into more visible metrics, and then in going through these different metrics and measures of values, you get a more prosperous and sustainable future. But if you think about this, how does this actually happen? And the way it happens is through engagement with dream teams like in Belize and elsewhere. So, that is one of the key lessons that we learned in this last 5 years is getting an engagement by the right people who can help solve these next-level innovations that are needed is the crucial element of the success for this scaling. So, again, these are the very diverse policies and investments that were moved along in significant ways in each of these 16 countries with the co-leadership by the development banks. So, just to say it was a diverse set of opportunities. But as this print shows, most of what we do is not limited by technical analysis. If you think about transforming a landscape like this, and more than 85% of the land the earth's surface is somehow been impacted by people, and people are integrating and interacting with it. Therefore, we need this immune response to include institutions and governance and individual leaders that will make these changes happen. It's not just methodology, and it's not just data, which is a lot of the innovation, but there's not been enough attention, we've all decided, on the governance and the institutions and the people capacity who can carry this work forward. So, I'm just going to give three quick examples of what we have seen that encourages durability in impact. So, I'm going to use China and Belize as the first two examples because they have been working on this and wrestling with incorporating nature into policy and finance for longer than many countries around the world. And as you can understand, they could not be more different. And then I'll give a an interesting um sort of off the hot off the press story in Chile that um friends in the room can tell you more about. So, the common elements, in spite of these very distinctly different geographies and cultures and governance structures, is this this adaptive governance, this learning mindset, focus on capacity, and real finance that's linked early on. These are what we've seen in both China and Belize, and it has resulted in a lasting commitment. A lasting commitment to taking nature into their policy and investment and and continuing to grow that. So, China's durability um factors and outcomes are some of them are listed here. Again, you can hear much more about this from our Chinese experts here in the room, and they'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon in a GEP session and also this afternoon. But, a couple of highlights. One thing that both China and Belize have in common, they have codified in their laws that they must do a natural capital spatial assessment for their country every 5 years. And that becomes the baseline data and information from which so much innovation flows. They learn a lot about what's changing, about where people are benefiting, and where people are losing benefits. They also China has been implementing, this is all about implementation as you heard a little bit this morning, some really novel policy mechanisms. And these then lead investment, significant investment in numbers of people, households, and yuan in many regions based on these regularly occurring ecosystem assessments. And this is also really driving stewardship. So we have friends here from the Stockholm Resilience Center, and many of you in the room have studied and are understanding the importance of stewardship as part of helping ecosystems recover and bring benefits ongoing to people. And if you pay people for stewardship the way China has been spearheading in incredible examples, then that can become a more lasting benefit. And then this livelihood connection. So this is the same as in Belize. If you connect nature to growth in livelihoods and security of livelihoods, then it becomes irresistible as Eileen Lee said earlier. So really briefly, Belize, very similar set of list lists of innovations here. It has a requirement for a natural capital assessment that they do every 5 years. They learn, they improve through monitoring, and this gives them a way to integrate through their coastal zone management authority and institute their fisheries, their forestry, their tourism, and their climate sectors all integrate to share data and learn over time how the benefits are flowing into the different parts of the economy. As Greg mentioned, they have now developed a key performance indicator system that's supported by a monitoring reporting and verification process that then can help them give confidence to investors. So, there are blue bonds, there's this project for finance permanence, there's more private money coming into Belize thanks in large part to the Inter-American Development Bank, but without Belize's commitment to monitoring and learning about what interventions are working and what is not working, this finance would not be flowing so freely. So, this is another way to show how do you build a dream team? So, this immune system that we're seeing that we need really takes a lot of effort from very different interests across a country's economy, from civil society, and crucially from financing institutions. So, the development banks being part of these integrated teams in these 16 countries where we worked were crucial to mobilizing finance from the beginning. They understood what the government was hoping to achieve, helped co-design the solutions, and then the loans and the financing was teed up and ready to go much more quickly. So, lastly, this just to say a little bit more about this science policy engagement process. So, Chile is a really interesting, relatively newer example. It's a little bit more recent than Belize and China's history, but they've used innovative governance. So, there's a natural capital committee, and Elias is here from Chile's Central Bank who's part of that. We have a team here led by Hector Ungarita and others who have worked with this cross-sectoral natural capital committee now through It's on its third um president. And so, they're trying to work cross-sectorally led by Ministry of Environment and Finance to mainstream these approaches across the sectors from the top in Chile and also working from the bottom in the different provinces. And one really great story that will touch some of the academics in this room, the fact that there was an IDB and Ministers of Finance and Economic Development and Forestry and Tourism, many ministries across the Natural Capital Committee, and academics from Chile working together, the academic researchers now have a much closer relationship with the government officials, and that pipeline of new students getting trained has been opened up and with direct access to what the Natural Capital Committee is working on. And those relationships, as you know, can be tricky to unlock, and this process has helped do that. And one more example I'll give, with Belize, this is um in the middle of that picture there is Leroy Martinez, who is in the the Ministry of Economic Transformation, and he was part of the dream team in Belize, as was Omar, and now Pauline Blanc from IDB, and they got to know each other. They basically became friends traveling around the country, flying up here to come present their work at this symposium, and that relationship has helped, by their own admission, unlock much more rapid financing because IDB, Greg mentioned IDB Climate this morning, and Omar knew that IDB Climate was a new financing stream coming out um and was ready for willing countries around Latin America and the Caribbean to take that up. And because of the long waits in plane rides, Leroy and Omar hatched a plan that Belize would become one of the first countries to get that financing. So, it's these little moments among leaders that often don't meet with one another where some of the spark and the acceleration can happen. Okay, and I'll close with this slide, which is This is not easy. So, Taylor Ricketts this morning talked about the one of the things he was surprised and disappointed about was that this wasn't just getting taken up faster. These compelling ideas, nature clearly matters to people, that's our life support system. Why isn't it just taking off? And part of the reason is that because we're talking about transforming societies, but I also think some of the reason is that we're not paying enough attention to the governance innovations like what Belize and China have done and Chile. Those are incredible innovations that other countries can learn from, and so let's help spread those. Maybe the development banks can help, maybe some academic treatments of governance innovation that that really helps move the needle faster. And then the institutions and building capacity and better deeper connections between research institutions and the immediate implementers in government and private sector. I think those really need our attention more more direct sort of focus on the how. How do we build these dream teams and how do we keep them going because transformation is really just people acting differently. So, with that I will I'll close and thank you all for listening. >> [applause] [applause] >> Okay, thank you Mary. I would now like to invite all of the speakers back up for a panel discussion. And you're probably getting a little sick of me, so I'm going to invite Lisa to moderate this panel. >> Thanks, Anne. Can folks hear me? Yes, this is on. Thank you all for those great presentations. I'm going to pick up on a theme of >> Narayan. >> Now we have everybody. >> [laughter] >> I'm I'm going to pick up on a theme Eileen that you introduced on your question of what does collaboration look like to meet our ambitions. And this first question I'm going to throw to our development bank colleagues here, Greg and Eric and Narayan. Can you tell us we heard in your talks some of the amazing work that each of your institutions is advancing on bringing natural capital approaches into policy and finance. Can you speak to to the MDBs are are working together and sharing best practices um to advance these efforts. >> You want to start? >> Uh you want me to start? Okay. Uh so, you know, I mean uh the good part of MDBs uh is uh and there are several good parts. >> [laughter] >> Is that we think and work pretty similarly. But the better part is that we work in different regions, mainly. So, we are able to naturally collaborate, you know, more. Uh the drawback of course is that uh we are usually, you know, so busy with our own uh uh you know, engagements and problems that we don't bother to collaborate. But uh in this case, you know, after COP26, I think was it? Uh joint and we we we you know, MDBs got together and actually expanded the group and 10, I think 10 IFIs got together and signed a joint the statement on nature. Uh and uh that was uh actually a a very, very significant uh milestone, I would say. Uh especially with respect to collaborating or coming together for for natural capital uh you know, investments. Because there we we got together and we had a five-point, you know, statement uh wherein we agreed to work together, think together and I mean I'm I don't recollect the statement really, but this was the gist of it. And uh one of the things I would like to really talk about from that statement is uh our you know, agreement to uh to at least begin looking at our own portfolios and seeing what we are financing that, you know, that is actually attributable to nature. And the next logical question was, you know, how do you define that? So, So, agreeing on a definition of what constitutes nature-positive finance. So, this you know, we we we then got we then agreed on a common taxonomy of of nature finance. What constitute How do you define it and how do you track it? And we've been then, you know, trying to establish common standards and and having everyone look at nature in the same way at least helps us to measure where we are and then if you want set milestones, set targets, or at least look back and see, you know, why we did not achieve what we wanted to do. Uh maybe, you know, correct certain perspectives, you know, wrong perspectives that might have prevailed earlier. Uh or or, you know, so just measuring something always, you know, produces better performance and this is what, you know, the important thing that, I would like to point out. Maybe Greg would would supplement. >> Maybe I can jump in also cuz I think there's like formal collaboration, there's informal collaboration. On the formal side, so yeah, there was the joint statement back in Glasgow, which, you know, the UK pushed very heavily as the person who was trying to get it signed by everybody. It's hard to get those things signed. So, it's not a small feat, right? Um building off of that, we did the tracking work, but we also then created a nature heads working group where so the nature heads of each of the institutions meet quarterly and then we have a sherpa group that kind of brings the work forward in between focused on specific areas. And so, there was the tracking. Another was the metrics work that I showed where we said, "Look, we're facing this challenge with metrics. We know that this is holding others back, too. Let's put our brains together." And then the way it works is like the MDB that kind of has some funding and some interest raises their hand. In that case, it was EIB and IDB. We said, "We'll fund this. Let's do it on and everybody works together on it together." We have another working group right now working on biodiversity credit and nature credit markets that that we're leading with EIB as a subgroup that we're going to, you know, try to release the papers at COP 17 about how MDBs can support nature credit markets. What are the mechanisms? What are we all doing? Taking stock of what each other are doing so that we can learn. So that's kind of the formal agenda. But then there's also the informal agenda and I would say that Nat Cap has actually tremendously strengthened that because I think back to when I first came here and Chingfeng is probably somewhere in the audience and he said to me like, I saw you guys created a natural capital lab. We want to do the same thing. Like, can you talk to us about how you did that? And and we did and then, you know, I was invited to also talk about how we did our debt for nature swaps and transfer that knowledge. At the same time we were getting all this great knowledge from the Asian Development Bank on the work with gross ecosystem product and the work in some of the pilots they were doing that we could then take into our countries. And so with Colombia, we tried to kind of say, what would a Colombian version of gross ecosystem product work like? So there is also that knowledge sharing aspect that I think is really important that actually is very much facilitated by the alliance. >> Yeah, so so um you know, one thing that I was worried about when we as a newcomer came into this space was that uh you know, here's competition. Here's uh you know, someone coming to tread on our on our turf and and now and is right that you know, there is some geographic uh difference but we work both in Asia and in Latin America and so for for us or for me also personally I thought it was something that would be kind of resentful that we came in but it's been the opposite. You know, really very welcoming, very willing to share experience. The beginning as a small uh development bank, you know, we had to co-finance. We didn't have any people to to support individual investment. So we are now the largest co-financier of uh ADB and and and the World Bank. And of course in this space, I think it's even more important that we do that type of of co-financing. Uh I was part of the reviewing their latest nature report uh from ADB. I think it it was a very interesting conversations we had. We are doing some pilots on biodiversity credits in China together with the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits. We have invited ADB to join there as well. So, I I think this this is not the problem. I think this is uh it's just something we need to do more of, of course, and and and find you know, different contexts in which we can collaborate, but it's it's a very uh you know, a very willing community to to work. >> So, for my my second question here, I'm again coming back to your remarks, Eileen. Um And this this question will be for for Matt and Mary and and Eileen. Um I mean, this this community is very focused on scaling natural capital approaches. That's the That's the theme of this session. Eileen, you said it's it's for a long time felt tantalizingly out of reach. Um if each of you if you could choose one thing that we, being collectively, this community in the room, could should do to scale more quickly or effectively, what would that be? >> I can start. I think um I think one thing for me, and others have touched on it, is is for us not to get bogged down in the language or bogged down into the detail. I think quite often we find that, you know, if you've you've not got the data, it scares people cuz think people think they should, you know, have natural capital accounts. And for me, it's not natural capital, you know, Eric Eric started his presentation talking well, presented his presentation on nature as infrastructure. We had a great event in London at the end of London Climate Action last week, which Nicola Ranger and colleagues at LSE organized on on nature as infrastructure. And, you know, bringing those into the equation, finding those new allies, I think is really what's going to scale this. Um and yeah, not focusing too much on the scary numbers in the data. >> I guess I want to pick up on something Greg said that I've been thinking about. So, I think you said in your presentation that you wanted to do not just the novel things, but the kind of boring things that are proven. And I actually think there's an element of this next phase of work is about being willing to lean into the things that make these natural capital investments boring, right? In the sense that they have that ability to be so um clearly measurable, verifiable, and understood in a way that the kind of um blended capital solutions that everybody was talking about can bring on private sector financing in that kind of vanilla way that the private sector wants to engage um much more possible. And then I think the other thought I would add to that, having also been last week at London Climate uh Action Week, and I think every single night at a slightly different dinner that was a version of raising money for these kind of blended finance solutions, with the exception of the TFFF right, which is truly swinging for the fences. Most of these were hoping to catalyze on the order of, you know, less than a billion. Which is great, but it's not quite, right, at that level of how do we really make these replicated? Because obviously, the reason I was doing these sequential dinners is because putting that capital stack together each time is a lot of work, right? So, I I guess I would ask, with the ingredients we have and the visibility around priorities, which it sounds like we already have, what does it look like to make it easier to bring these capital stacks together so that we can start reaching for a larger scale? >> Yeah, I I was going to say something similar. So, I'll just add and then and then share that so that we have this new massive open online course, this new MOOC that has lessons from this portfolio the 16 countries with a focus on the LAC countries, but we have learned a lot as you said and whatever these this financing stack looks like or what are some of the solutions that have been emerging and can we wrap those into courses or ways to get out to the people who are implementing right now, not not sort of like there's a lot of new research needed. Of course, there's always gaps, but there is a lot that has been worked out and could we more quickly accelerate that through I don't know the mechanisms. You guys probably know better, but yeah. >> This your your point about making this boring resonates. I was in a meeting 2 weeks ago where that was another theme of like, yeah, make natural capital boring [laughter] and maybe that's the that's the metric of success we should be looking for when it really is vanilla and and and usual. Um We've We've again had more um more people with uh expertise to contribute than we have seats on the stage. So, to end the session, I would like to invite um a colleague from the African Development Bank, Dr. Innis Ona, I believe is here um to uh come up and introduce himself and given the time, we can pose a question for further reflection um as we move on. >> [applause] >> Here. Oh. >> Yes. Hi. >> Um thank you and good afternoon everyone. Uh my name is Innocent Ona. I work for the African Development Bank as chief natural resource officer. Uh it's a pleasure to be here and thanks to Natural Capital Alliance for inviting the African Development Bank and uh we were trying to uh have this conversation and most of my colleagues uh whom I know very well uh the MDB working group on on nature. Uh this conversation has been going on for some time and the African Development Bank is already accelerating actions on the ground as well. So, I just wait to see uh what kind of contributions we could make uh knowledge that we could also share and uh also learn you know from from this group. So, I'm happy to be here and uh I know there's a session ending by 3:30 and uh maybe at that point I could also share more. But, I mean I'm available to answer any question that you may have so as as to contribute to the discussion as well. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> [applause] >> I'll just end by saying I'm it's really striking the work that the institutions that you all represent are doing individually and and collectively. Um again, it's not just about the data and about the information, but really transforming institutions um to make all this mainstream and boring. So, this gives me Excuse me, hope to come back to the question um I think Gretchen posed at the earlier this morning. So, um We We have after this session, we're all going to take photos out front. But, before we do that, will you please join me in thanking um this wonderful panel. >> [applause] >> Thank you.