Nature Is Investable: So Why Isn't the Money Moving?
About the Session
Nature underpins agriculture, water systems, supply chains, livelihoods, and much of the global economy. Rainforests influence water far beyond their boundaries. Healthy watersheds protect communities and infrastructure. Forests, soils, and other ecosystems provide services that businesses and economies depend on every day.
Yet recognizing nature's value has not translated into investment at anything close to the scale required.
The problem is not necessarily a lack of solutions or even a lack of capital. It is the difficult work of connecting the two. Conservation finance mechanisms may exist, but utilities and land managers that could deploy nature-based solutions at scale are often part of separate conversations. Carbon finance can create opportunities, but measurement and verification systems may work better for large landholders than smallholder or tribal farmers. Investors may finance projects while overlooking the local teams, training, data systems, and organizational capacity required to make those projects succeed.
So what would make nature genuinely investable at scale?
This session will explore what is preventing more private, institutional, and philanthropic capital from moving into nature-based solutions. It will look at the structures needed to close real deals, from watershed protection and wildfire mitigation to carbon finance and sustainable land management, while asking what kinds of funding are needed behind the scenes to make those investments possible.
It will also examine a more fundamental shift: bringing our dependence on nature into active economic awareness. If nature is essential infrastructure, how should that change the way businesses, investors, utilities, philanthropists, and governments value and finance it?
Discussion Group Leaders
Arti Dhar is Co-Founder at Farmers for Forests, advancing biodiverse agroforestry and forest protection with smallholder and tribal farmers through community-led implementation and AI-enabled carbon monitoring.
Rachel Gavaghan is Trust Officer at Cool Earth, building philanthropic partnerships that support Indigenous communities to protect rainforests.
A practical conversation about moving nature finance from recognition to deployment. Participants will examine where deals get stuck and what happens when capital providers, utilities, land managers, communities, and conservation organizations are brought into the same conversation.
The discussion will consider private and institutional capital alongside philanthropy, including the role of flexible, long-term, and capacity-building funding in creating the conditions for investment at scale.
Who This Is For
This session is for investors, philanthropists, utilities, land managers, conservation organizations, Indigenous and community leaders, businesses, governments, carbon-market practitioners, and others working to finance and scale nature-based solutions.
What You Will Get Out of It
A clearer understanding of what prevents nature-based solutions from attracting capital at scale
Ideas for connecting conservation finance with utilities, land managers, and other potential buyers
Approaches to making carbon finance and MRV work for smaller landholders and communities
A stronger case for funding capacity, infrastructure, and organizations alongside individual projects
Perspectives on how philanthropy, private capital, and institutional investment can work together more effectively