The Beekly: The Conservation Fund's EVP and General Counsel, Kristina Wyatt
Most people in this industry have argued climate disclosure from one seat. Kristina Wyatt has argued it from nearly all of them — private practice, the SEC, climate software, and now conservation.
In this episode of The Beekly, Adriel Lubarsky sits down with Kristina Wyatt, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at The Conservation Fund, to talk about where climate risk, corporate governance, and capital allocation actually intersect — and why the interesting question is no longer what companies have to report.
Kristina spent nearly a decade at Latham & Watkins in global commercial transactions before becoming its Director of Sustainability. She then served as Special Senior Counsel for Climate and ESG at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during the drafting of the climate disclosure rule, followed by four years as General Counsel and Chief Sustainability Officer at Persefoni. Today she oversees legal, governance, and risk management at one of the country's leading conservation organizations.
Her current argument: resilience is shifting from a cost line to a source of economic value. Reliable water, a dependable grid, functioning natural systems — these are the reason capital shows up in a place, and their absence is the reason it leaves. As AI makes intelligence abundant, the sharper question becomes what gets scarce, and therefore valuable, as a result.
We'll dig into:
What the retreat from mandatory disclosure did — and didn't — change about legal exposure for public companies
How GCs and CFOs should factor asset-level risk into siting, capex, and supply chain decisions
Resilience as an asset rather than a cost — and what that means for how boards evaluate investment
Where nature-based and natural infrastructure assets fit into a financial materiality argument
What defensible climate governance looks like when regulatory pressure softens but insurers, lenders, and rating agencies don't
Who should attend: General Counsel, CFOs, Chief Risk Officers, and corporate sustainability and strategy leaders responsible for translating climate risk into decisions leadership will actually act on.