Nature Tech Signals: Introducing the Nature Integrity Target — a draft framework for corporate environment
For thirty years, corporate sustainability has been built on a single question: how much damage are you doing?
Measure the footprint. Reduce it. Offset what's left. The logic is familiar. So is the result: a system that places the burden of environmental responsibility almost entirely on companies that make, move, and mine things — while the banks, fintechs, and infrastructure providers that finance and enable the global economy remain largely outside the frame.
Dr. Simon Schillebeeckx thinks this is structurally broken. And he is asking a different question:
Instead of asking how much harm a company causes, the Nature Integrity Target asks: what is the minimum contribution every economic actor should make to maintain a functioning planet?
It's a subtle shift with radical implications — one that redirects attention from guilt to economic power, from voluntary offsets to a kind of planetary maintenance fee, and from carbon as the dominant signal to a much richer picture of where restoration capital should actually flow.
Join the Nature Tech Collective and Handprint for a conversation that won't resolve neatly (and isn't supposed to)
The session will explore:
Why carbon footprinting is structurally insufficient as a framework for nature
How economic power — revenue, valuation, wealth — could replace ecological intensity as the basis for responsibility
What "Nature Integrity" could look like in practice for banks, fintechs, and infrastructure providers
Whether this could become the next corporate license to operate — and what that would take
This session is for:
Nature tech founders and practitioners ready to interrogate the assumptions underneath their market
Investors thinking about what comes after carbon markets
Sustainability leaders who've felt the limits of footprint-based frameworks
Anyone willing to entertain the idea that the next decade looks less like net zero and more like building an operating system for planetary maintenance
Part of a new Nature Tech Signals series from the Nature Tech Collective: ideas from the edge of the sector, stress-tested in public.