Nature’s investment frontier
Practical paths forward for biodiversity markets and finance
By Ricardo Bayon, Charles Bedford, Genevieve Bennett, Adam Davis, Ben Guillon, Katherine Hamilton, Michael Jenkins, Dr. Timothy Male, Martine Maron, Julia McCarthy, Yuejia Peng, Fabien Quétier, Mariana Sarmiento, Ryan Sarsfield, David Tepper, and Amrei von Hase View PublicationWe live in a world where most of our everyday decisions, from the mundane to grandiose (whether we buy a cup of coffee or not, or whether we build a dam or not) are shaped by our economic operating system. This system—call it finance, call it capitalism, call it the market—has been organically built over the past centuries. It is one of the most powerful human achievements. Without it, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
But it has one potentially fatal flaw: it’s blind to the older operating system that runs life on Earth—the interconnected web of living systems in forests, coral reefs, wetlands, and all ecosystems. This “NatureOS” turns solar energy into food and fiber, cycles nutrients, and provides clean air and water. It makes life possible. Yet, unless nature’s products become “natural resources” (wood, food, minerals), our “EconomyOS” doesn’t consider them valuable.
We know there’s a bug in EconomyOS; we just don’t know how to debug it. For decades, we’ve experimented with solutions, but they often seem to operate in silos, with little time spent looking across markets or considering the broader view.
This report, in the best tradition of EM, offers that broader view. It provides a diverse and deeply informed set of perspectives on what we’ve learned about markets and finance for biodiversity over the course of decades of experimentation.
