We have lost a staggering 70% of the UK’s nature in our lifetimes. And when I say lost, I mean destroyed. That is a problem not only for nature itself, but because nature loss is a resilience problem.
We cannot have resilient communities or a resilient economy without thriving and resilient nature.
For decades, we have tended to treat nature loss as an environmental problem. Increasingly, however, we understand that it is also an economic and financial risk.
The World Economic Forum estimates that more than half of global GDP, around $44 trillion of economic value, is highly dependent on nature and the services it provides. The World Bank has estimated that the collapse of just a handful of ecosystem services, including pollination, fisheries and timber, could reduce global GDP by $2.7 trillion every year by 2030.
These are extraordinary numbers. But we do not need global economic models to understand what this means. We can see it in our own communities.
When a river catchment can no longer hold water back, people’s homes and businesses flood. When soils become degraded, our food system becomes less resilient. When wetlands disappear or rivers become polluted, securing clean water becomes harder and more expensive. As coastal habitats disappear, communities become more exposed to storms and rising seas.
Nature is vital infrastructure
Our rivers, wetlands, soils, woodlands and coastlines perform functions every bit as important to our long-term prosperity as the infrastructure we build from concrete and steel.
Investment in nature recovery is not simply about saving wildlife. It is an investment in resilience.
Investing in nature cleans our air and water. It reduces flooding. It restores our soils and locks away carbon. It reconnects us with nature, improving our health and wellbeing. It revitalises wildlife and supports new economic opportunities, including nature-based jobs and enterprises.
So the question is not whether we can afford to restore nature. Increasingly, it is whether we can afford not to.
We need to mobilise people as well as finance
We talk a lot about mobilising finance for nature. I think we need to talk just as much about mobilising people and communities, because we will not restore nature through finance alone.
Nature exists in places, and people live and work in those places. They farm the land, run businesses, build homes, manage water, make planning decisions, volunteer, campaign, invest and raise their families.
If nature recovery is going to last, communities cannot simply be the recipients of projects designed somewhere else by someone else. They need to be co-creators of change.
Ultimately, they need the power and resources to become stewards of the places on which their prosperity and wellbeing depend.
That means bringing together things that have historically been kept apart. Nature recovery, community wellbeing and economic prosperity are too often presented as choices:
Homes or nature.
Jobs or nature.
Economic growth or environmental protection.
But that is not how it has to be. The more important question is:
How do we invest in places so that nature recovery, homes, jobs, health and community resilience reinforce one another rather than compete?
Three examples, at three very different scales, show what that could mean.
Solving the Solent’s nutrient problem through nature recovery
A few years ago, nutrient pollution in the Solent created what many people saw as an unavoidable conflict.
We needed new homes. But we also needed to protect internationally important coastal habitats from the damage that pollution was causing.
The obvious political response would have been to weaken environmental protection to allow development to continue. Instead, Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust asked whether restoring nature through land-use change could actually be part of the solution.
We bought two intensively managed farms on the coast, stopped the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and began restoring the land for nature.
Reducing fertiliser run-off from that land allowed us to create nutrient-mitigation credits. These enabled development to proceed without adding to the nutrient burden in the Solent.
Together, the two land-use change projects are reducing nitrate pollution by 3.6 tonnes every year and have enabled more than 2,500 homes to be built.
At the same time, hundreds of acres are being restored for nature, with funding secured for their long-term stewardship. Butterflies and birds are thriving. New jobs have been created, and studies have shown improvements in community wellbeing.
The projects demonstrate that, done well, investment in natural infrastructure can solve several problems at once.
Restoring an entire river system
There is growing evidence that the economics of this approach can really stack up.
The Wildlife Trusts and Intact Insurance recently published work examining what it would take to restore the River Trent from source to sea. Rather than looking at a series of individual projects, they asked what benefits could be created by restoring the entire river system.
The numbers are striking. The report estimates that investment of £43 million a year over 30 years could generate £10 billion in economic, environmental and social benefits.
That is more than £7 of benefits for every £1 invested.
The value would come from reduced flood risk, cleaner water, carbon sequestration, recreation and health, green jobs, more resilient communities and, of course, recovering wildlife.
This vision cannot be delivered by one organisation, one investor or one environmental project. It depends on communities, farmers, businesses and local authorities working together across an entire catchment, with nature-based solutions deployed at scale.
This is what financing resilience starts to look like.
Investing in the resilience of an entire place
But what would happen if we invested not just in individual projects or landscapes, but in the resilience of an entire place?
The Isle of Wight is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The concept being developed within the Biosphere is that nature, community and economy are not separate systems. They are one interconnected system.
At the moment, neither finance nor decision-making generally works like that. We might see funding directed to a flood scheme in one place, a nature project in another, an economic development programme somewhere else and a health intervention somewhere else again.
But what if, instead, we started with the place?
What does this community need to be prosperous and resilient in 20, 30 or 50 years’ time?
That could mean a shared vision for healthy nature, clean air and water, affordable homes, good jobs, sustainable food, clean energy, better health and thriving communities.
We could then ask:
How can investment help us achieve those things together?
We have started to attract investors who understand that vision and can help bring together public investment, private capital, philanthropy and nature finance around a shared ambition for the Isle of Wight.
Crucially, this is not about doing something to a community. It is about people coming together as co-creators of what a resilient island could look like.
Watch this space.
From financing growth to financing resilience
My challenge to the finance sector is this: do not just ask how we mobilise more money for nature or for communities. Think more broadly than that.
Resilience does not come from finance alone. It comes from healthy natural systems, thriving communities and economies that understand their dependence on both.
Finance can play an extraordinary role in making that possible, not simply by funding projects, but by enabling communities to become co-creators and long-term stewards of the places where they live.
Some returns will be financial. Others will come through reduced flooding, cleaner water, healthier communities, better places to live, more resilient businesses and recovering wildlife.
Those benefits accrue to different people and organisations over different timescales. We therefore need finance capable of recognising multiple forms of value, over longer time horizons, and sharing both risk and reward across the organisations and communities that benefit.
If the twentieth century was about financing growth, perhaps the twenty-first century needs to be about financing resilience.