 Today's discussion, we're talking about how we catalyze investments into nature-based solutions. We're really lucky to have a really exciting set of speakers today who I think represent sort of important interlinking parts of this ecosystem. So very quickly, I'm Ida. I'm from Galvanize. I'll be monitoring this conversation. Just for background galvanizes, we're a climate-focused investment firm, so we invest across venture and growth, real estate, and public equities, all with an eye to scaling climate solutions in this decade. I'm joined by Mike Kett, who is co-founder and partner at New Leaf Climate Partners. David Sternlich, who is the head of nature investing at Ethic. And also Kelly Rytel, who is a client success lead at Pichama. And I will give them an opportunity to share a little bit more about sort of exactly what they do and where they play shortly. But before we get into this, I'm sure, you know, I see some familiar faces in the room. There are investors and practitioners here who are well familiar with what NBS is and don't need the definition. But just a level set for those of you who are coming into the space and ramping up, which is what we're excited about. We're trying to, I think, we need more people focused on these issues. We need more allocators and investors focused on these issues to give the 101. So nature-based solutions, and sometimes I will abbreviate as NBS during this conversation, are solutions which help protect, restore, and manage our natural ecosystems. So they are things that can increase the capacity of our ecosystems to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are things that can enhance ecosystem services like water filtration or pollination or flood regulation. And they are often things that also help conserve biodiversity and prevent further degradation of these natural spaces. So in short, nature-based solutions are the levers or the tools that we have to really build our natural capital. So just to make that more concrete, so examples of this could conclude everything from avoiding further deforestation or helping forest restoration, mangroves, peatlands, enhancing our ocean health. It's really anything that helps any of those different types of ecosystems. Other things that you might hear in this packet might include things like green infrastructure or things for climate adaptation or climate resilient agriculture, regenerative agriculture. And then sort of importantly, I think the other thing that we bucket into nature-based solutions are any of the enabling tools or technologies that help us measure, monitor, and ultimately value the services provided by our ecosystems. So all of that is in the sort of the sphere of NBS. Sometimes I will slip and say natural climate solutions are NCS, which I tend to think of as a subset of NBS that specifically are servicing the avoidance or seek restoration of greenhouse gas emissions. I'll just say a few more things on this. So the reason they are important is because they comprise as much, if not more than a third, of our total sort of climate impact potential that we have to help stay aligned to a 1.5 degree scenario. So it's estimated that nature-based solutions can remove or avoid as much as 11 to 12 gigatons of emissions per year, which is enormous, that's a multiple of what the U.S. emits annually. And they're also among the most cost-effective climate solutions. So when we think about what we need to actually achieve 1.5 or 2 degree scenario, obviously there's that requires hundreds of trillions of investment and nature-based solutions are some of the most effective strategies that we have to actually getting there. Although momentum is building, nature-based solutions also comprise a really small proportion of climate finance flows today. So I've seen a couple different estimates, some of them are more worrisome than others, but on the loan, folks say that less than 3% of total global climate finance goes into nature-based solutions. It's growing and there are reasons that it's challenging and will unpack some of the solutions and opportunities to address those today, but that's why we're having this conversation. It's a huge impact opportunity and one that we don't want to miss. So with that, I will turn a little bit to our panelists. So I would love for each of you to tell us a little bit more about your background and the platform you represent and so where you play in this space. So I'll start with you, Mike. Great. Thank you, Eden. Good morning, everyone. It's the morning people for nature. I'm Mike Kent. I'm a co-founder and partner of New Leaf Climate Partners. My background is I spent the last decade at BlackRock helping build out their sustainable investing platform and was leading a lot of their climate investment activity in 2021. Took a step back and focused on food and agriculture, giving at the Climate Works Foundation, and at the end of 2021 founded New Leaf Climate Partners. I think what's been animating me is sort of asking the question what's missing with respect to climate finance and back when I left BlackRock, there were very few conversations happening at the institutional investor level around at that point even food and ag, but nature more broadly. I think we've made sizable progress with respect to food investment, but nature is still lagging. So New Leaf Climate Partners, we are a strategic investment and advisory firm focused on mobilizing more capital into NBS. We research, design, build, fund, and deploy new investment strategies targeting bottlenecks in the NBS ecosystem. And we focused importantly on what we call blended finance solutions. So kind of the combination of grant slash philanthropic funding, moving to impact investment in order to help hopefully scale toward institutional capital. So a few examples of this, our first line of research was actually looking into U.S. seed as in literal seed and seed link capacity for restoration projects, and specifically at native varietals. Basically we're underproducing and we need to level up in order to meet our planning targets. And so we're launching what we're calling the nursery financing facility to address that gap. Some other concurrent lines of research include helping finance landowners to restore their landscapes and supporting urban greenery projects. So a lot of work and we're just getting started. So thank you. Thank you, Mike. Over to you, David. Awesome. Morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I'm David Sternleicht. I lead the Nature Investing Platform at Ethic. Ethic is a sustainability-only asset manager. We do custom sustainability-focused public equity portfolios and in private markets we invest in projects that regenerate nature and generate some sort of cash flow in the process. We see biodiversity and climate as twin crises, biodiversity loss and climate change as twin crises. The former is getting a fraction of the attention of the latter despite the fact that half the global economy is directly facing some sort of nature risks. It's quite pervasive. By the end of the decade it's expected that we're going to be in roughly an $800 billion shortfall in terms of financing flowing towards this broad category of nature-based solutions and that's what's required to start bending this curve of nature loss that we're facing. Some of that's going to be bridged by governments, some by philanthropy and quite a lot by the private sector which includes corporations and investors and that's where we come in. We're aiming to do our part in bridging that gap by financing projects that help facilitate this transition to a more regenerative economy. Welcome David, Kelly. Hi everybody, my name is Kelly Rytel and I am the client success lead at Pachama. At Pachama our mission is to protect and restore nature to fight climate change. There's a lot of ways that we could do that but we are focused solely in the forestry space and right now we have two offerings that we work with corporates for and so the first one is we find and vet third-party carbon credit projects, so projects that are already existing including forest protection credits in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in the tropical forests around the world and we onboard only about 30% of them after we have conducted our tech-enabled due diligence. We're really pushing the boundaries about what's possible in this industry with our dynamic control area baseline analysis which is a mouthful and there's an explainer online if anyone is super curious but essentially it provides a very high certainty that a ton is a ton and that is super important for corporates to invest with confidence in carbon credits and the second offering we have is Pachama originals where we're standing up new projects mostly in the reforestation space and this is important because we know that there is also need for reforestation and our suite of technologies can really help scale the market and build a pipeline to meet the demand that will come and it also gives corporate a chance to make a real impact and instead of kind of a check-the-box activity that they feel like this is something that third-party bodies are kind of forcing them to do that this is something that they can craft and feel like they are having a true impact and able to story-tell around that. Thank you. Wonderful. So as you can tell we sort of have a nice mix of folks sort of tackling issues in this space from different vantage points and we'll hear from all of them on this. So I wanted to start the first part of this conversation talking a little bit about the market drivers in the nature-based solutions arena. Although nature-based solutions have always existed in some ways, I think there's an interesting confluence of factors from the obviously availability of technologies our understanding of the impact opportunity increased interest from corporates and investors many sort of new regulatory and voluntary initiatives to further and send activity in this space and so we wanted to impact some of those to show some of the momentum in this arena. So I wanted to start with you, Mike, a little bit. Obviously you helped build New Leaf Climate Partners and you've picked a couple different areas that you guys are designing products and solutions around. Could you tell us a little bit about the convergence of trends that caused you to build your firm now and also design a particular set of solutions that you're focused on? Sure. I think some of the motivating factors I think at the macro level are more troubling. As David mentioned, the defining issues of our generation in my mind are sort of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. And fortunately nature can address both in parallel so I think that pointed us down that path. And then I think on the more optimistic front so that's kind of why we started looking at nature in the first place. Oh, and I should add that there's obviously the massive funding gap that we've been talking about to this huge risk but also this large and growing potential. And then I think some of the other trends that are more hopeful are I think encouraging signs of interest and funding particularly at the federal and state levels the passage of the IRA, historic bill includes funding for everything from climate smart agriculture to private forestry improvement and health to urban greenery. And we're seeing and it'll take time to really observe the impacts of that funding but I think provides a significant tailwind for us. And then on the corporate side I think interest in carbon markets evolving obviously some chilling effect from articles in Bloomberg and Guardian others that we can discuss but in general I think the trend is clear that there's going to be more private sector engagement in nature and one trend that we're seeing that is informing some of our work is sort of a move toward as you were saying Kelly having corporates more involved in the project design and what we've been hearing is sort of an interest in kind of designing implementing locally or locally relevant projects for corporates so kind of operating in the communities that they practice in and have impact in and so we're engaging with a number of US based clients kind of on land restoration efforts right here at home. So I think it's really the confluence of factors coming together that's been forming and shaping our strategy. That's fantastic I actually want to dig into every sort of bit that you said there but maybe Kelly I wanted to hear a little bit more about Pachama's work as well you guys focus on both later for your restoration as well as obviously the avoided degradation could you talk a little bit about sort of why both sides of that equation are important and also how the technology has evolved in the last couple of years and what that's enabling. Yeah absolutely so as you mentioned nature based solutions have the potential to mitigate 30% of emissions by 2030 and so that's a really big chunk we can't just ignore that. We do know that we need to absolutely drive to zero deforestation by that time so protecting our current forests is that needs to be and should be the top priority because a lot of that carbon is what can be considered irrecoverable carbon which means that if it is cut down we do not have enough time to restore it to the carbon capacity that we need it to be to prevent the worst effects of climate change so a big chunk of that is conservation I think the challenge with that particularly when it comes to carbon markets is what we do is we say if this project started because of the incentive of carbon credit financing so now we have to prove a counterfactual that that indeed would have been deforested and that's the most difficult part and that's where our technology is really focused on in terms of identifying the threats in the region and in a very statistical way proving that that this land and that project is doing a good job at preventing deforestation and so that's where the advances in satellite monitoring and machine learning come in to create these models and make sure we're looking at the threatened areas appropriately so that's on the, you know, that's why this is hard to do but it is also why it's so important to do and I think I may have missed one element of your question but I think that should cover most of it I think that was a great responsible so this is really helpful and I think in fact a tiny little bit about like some of the, yeah what's happening on the supply side but I also just wanted to help paint a little bit of a picture on the demand side and obviously well without saying the answer I would love to hear from one of you what are you seeing in terms of the demand side evolving corporate interest in nature based solutions obviously we've seen there's been even just in 2023 obviously the initial recommendations from the task force for nature focused financial disclosure I think I got that acronym correct obviously there's now science-based targets one can set for nature would one of you would one of you want to opine a little bit on what you're seeing in trends on the demand side sure David so if you think about the path of climate finance just the arc of that story we've been aware of climate science for decades so it's not that there was any uncertainty apologies if I'm offending anyone on this front it's not that there was any uncertainty about the risks climate change was posing to society were we not to act there was a lot of shareholder activism in the early years of ESG and impact investing that moved the needle a bit there were a ton more asset management firms that were formed to directly finance solutions to climate change there were groundswells of voluntary corporate pledges to decarbonize in the last few years and all of this was before there was any meaningful legislation in the US on climate broadly which in the form of the IRA I see nature we've talked about how nature and biodiversity and climate have a mutual ally in nature but nature has not gotten as much dedicated attention yet there have been a lot of seminal research pieces coming out in the last few years the Paulson Institute did a really great report in 2020 the world economic forum did that report that showed 44 trillion of economic activity is dependent on nature and then people have kind of been people and firms and other researchers have been deconstructing that and seeing what does that really mean well if pollinators were to be wiped out 500 billion dollars of crops are at risk I think it's a third to 40% of all pharmaceuticals in circulation have been discovered in nature not in a laboratory or maybe with something from nature brought into a laboratory the list goes on and on construction, timber utilities, telecom anything that is in nature depends on nature there are the last data I saw showed that about 60% of Fortune 500 companies had acknowledged some awareness of nature related risks and only 5% had some kind of hard action some sort of solid pledge to reduce those risks and potentially capitalize on some opportunities so I think awareness is growing it's also I don't want to get too much into the carbon markets conversation but it's also becoming a heck of a lot easier to like measure and attribute the benefits of nature to all sorts of issues I was just going to add the primary route into the nature conversation has been through a climate lens to date and for a good reason as has been discussed but I think that moving forward there is a separate and evolving and maturing discussion just around nature more holistically that can follow the playbook of climate and hopefully leapfrog and accelerate a lot of the advances that we've seen in climate change sort of investment so for example the climate action 100 we now have the nature action 100 focused specifically on engaging with corporates on nature related risks and opportunities and the task force for nature related financial disclosure following closely in the footsteps of the TCFD of climate related financial disclosure and so I think having this separate discussion by the climate path I think nature will be able to expand and broaden but again this entry point through climate in some ways has has raised challenges I think going back to the issue of supply there was a race toward procuring sort of low cost carbon credits which has put us in this situation we're in today 97% of the market of the voluntary carbon market has focused on avoided emissions or reduced emissions as opposed to emissions reduction or emissions removal and I think that's because if you only look at it from a climate lens then you're going to say how do I basically buy the cheapest carbon credits that are most widely available at scale and at that time that's been again focused on red plus which we need but has eliminated or reduced the demand for things like removal credits and so again I think with sort of a parallel path of nature related frameworks and investment standards that will set the foundation for increased capital flows but sort of trailing behind the climate conversation broadly that's such an interesting point and actually I think a perfect segue to sort of where I wanted to go with this which is as we alluded to nature does certainly have a climate benefit but it also has so many other co-benefits whether those be economic or other forms of environmental benefits that they can achieve and Kelly you look up I would love to maybe turn you Kelly a little bit on how you're helping your customers think about that value stack above and beyond the carbon benefit yeah absolutely just to tag on to that last question I will say that we've seen two different types of corporates invest in nature so ones that have like supply chains very close to nature so they already understand the risks or further along on that journey but then we see a lot of leaders particularly in the tech industry Netflix, Salesforce, Apple that are investing in in nature and so that's really encouraging on the biodiversity front so certainly there is a lot of interest that we see with our clients I think there's more like there's a lot more confusion and a lot less clarity around kind of what they should be aiming for we have some really cool technology coming out that really attempts to put metrics based numbers on biodiversity and so one of the metrics that we're leaning into and socializing with our clients is what is called technically it's called the star abatement score and essentially this is meant to be a normalizing factor across all ecosystems to say if this area is protected how valuable is it in comparison to other areas and so our science team is kind of knee deep and wading through all these numbers and figures to figure out how to convey this information and convey how important it is to protect these ecosystems so that our corporate partners can also tell a story and the importance of kind of how much biodiversity and threatened species are in that area that will directly benefit from protection or restoration well I have to ask obviously we have carbon markets we are seeing sort of nascent emergence of biodiversity markets so I think it's very exciting does anyone want to take the over under on whether what does our biodiversity market look like in five years time does it exist I hope so yeah I think the challenge now is as Kelly was explaining just around measurement frameworks standards a ton of carbon is a ton of carbon what's biodiversity it's all place based and context specific so having a tradable instrument I think is is the challenge not insurmountable but I think that's where the market from my perspective is at now but hopefully move past this point to where it can be a compliment to the existing carbon markets but again captures all these other co-benefits that we care about and we know that we need to address addressing yeah I think they absolutely have a role too they just need to biodiversity credits need to be careful not to be perceived or positioned as offsets because the notion of like destroying a healthy ecosystem over here and planting a few trees over here and washing your hands of it doesn't really work it's not fungible like carbon which poses a challenge in developing a market around something that's inherently very difficult to commodify and standardize across different ecosystems and geographies but folks are trying so I don't expect there to be significant portions of the volume as in carbon markets rolling through one or two registries I think there's going to be a lot of different methodologies and companies with different levels of awareness and targets around nature can pick something around a specific species or specific type of ecosystem that might help de-risk their supply chain it's going to be a little bit wild westy for most of these next five years I think but come year five I hope the dust has settled into something that works no fair enough I think that that is as realistic a pathway as I think anyone could imagine so before we sort of turn to the next part of our conversation I really want to focus on capital availability and trends we're seeing in investment in the space I did want to just want to say in climate we talk so much about the IRI the inflation reduction act and bipartisan infrastructure law being such tailwinds for our space and there are pockets of these that are really targeting nature based solutions in particular climate smart commodities all these different pieces and I'm curious and I know David and Mike you both alluded to their influence in your work are you seeing this legislation help drive up whether it's sort of capital deployment or solution scale up in the arenas you're working in and the answer could also be that there are still challenges in taking advantage of them but I'd be curious if you've seen it as a tailwind so far Happy to start I mean certainly yes but I think it's still too early to really look at the context of the funding but I think has encouraged and incentivized a lot of folks to be thinking about the sector in more concrete ways and for us what that has meant has been looking at the legislation to say for the landowner sort of support pieces included in the IRA for forest landowners for private forest landowners for the urban forestry component of the IRA what is missing from these bills and what does it not address I think it's unrealistic and unhelpful for us to put all of our emphasis only on a single piece of legislation I think that we've solved the problem of course this is just one single funding cycle obviously a step in the right direction but it leaves open the need for leverage finance for piling on private finance and so for the landowner piece I mean there are a lot of restrictions for what they can and can't do and so we're trying to think where are the gaps with that for urban forestry for example the IRA doesn't fund maintenance of trees and this is a long term issue and a significant issue when we're thinking about urban canopy for example and so how might a private sector player or partner come fill that fill that gap and so I think that's where it's been supportive and moving the conversation forward and again it's up in the right direction it also leaves the potential for others to crowd around it Fair enough Fantastic, so I wanted to spend the second half of this conversation talking a bit more about trends in investing in nature based solutions and what some of the ongoing barriers are still are that I think each of our panelists are helping work addressing but I wanted to start with you David to talk a little bit about obviously you're building this platform at Ethic which I presume is also in response to increased demand for nature positive investments and so could you share a little bit about what you're seeing from your clients and the allocators you work with on on demand for these strategies Sure, yeah so I mentioned you know biodiversity went from being a very marginalized and minimally understood issue to one that's gotten quite a lot of press attention and attention and sustainability circles initially in Europe and now increasingly in the US and yeah our client base is mostly US investors and we've seen quite a lot more interest in this broad topic of nature and biodiversity in public markets and also in private markets and I think part of it is that nature is just a little bit more of a unifying force and not as politically polarized versus climate and I think that's what's going to allow attention and capital flowing towards nature to accelerate much more quickly than the 15-20 year arc of climate finance but in terms of the opportunity set that allocators see that our investors might see most of the funds and asset managers investing in nature based solutions have been formed in the last three years or so so I think one impediment to things ramping up more quickly is just that as an allocator is evaluating the space it's legitimized by a perceived breadth of potential investment opportunities and then depth of the market they're under like depth in terms of well how much can any given asset manager bring into their pipeline and potentially finance and so I think that's one hurdle I've been to a lot of panels on nature based solutions I've never heard the category defined as clearly as you did at the outset here and I think a lack of that really helps people wrap their mind around what this category means. Some people describe NBS and what they're really just talking about is avoided deforestation projects that are monetizing via carbon credits so that's kind of one type of project and one revenue model and that's not enough dimensionality for an allocator to say okay this is this is an interesting enough category that I could carve out an asset allocation for it but if it's described as a broad range of project types cutting across different ecosystems using very tried and true none of these projects is easy to execute planting trees isn't easy doing regenerative agriculture is tried and true and it's there's no technology risk it's not necessarily easy but there's a lot of evidence that if you do it well you can if you execute well you can do it and so I think once folks appreciate this isn't rocket science this is sort of a unified investment theme in that ecosystem services are an undervalued asset to humanity and we're going to wrap our minds around properly valuing nature and all that it provides to us then I think that paired with better communication about what this idea of opportunities looks like that's what can help bring more investors off the sideline I think so we're getting there they're depth in the market the breadth is improving well David you're teeing yourself up you've done some interesting thinking I think on this idea of nature as an asset class and maybe just to stay with you for a beat I think you started alluding to that but I would love to hear your case for why it is and how that helps investors think about deploying toward this opportunity set Mike's going to fight me on this I think I mean I think it is and it has to be and yeah I guess I teed I teed up how I feel about this and what I was just sharing but the thing about asset classes from an investor's point of view is there's not a unified definition I wrote down how the Yale investment office which is the preeminent endowment style institution institutional investment office thinks the definition is the definition of an asset class is quite subjective requiring precise distinctions where none exist and this is the most sophisticated institutional investor out there and I'm not knocking Yale I'm acknowledging that like even they say it's a little bit hazy so you know what are some analogies we could look at the cryptocurrency space there's not a whole lot that's consistent across different types of token other than the word token in the words crypto but they were remarkably successful over the last really five years and kind of positioning the cryptocurrency world as an asset class despite limited consistency real estate is another one so there's an investor like Yale investing in real estate could do anything from supporting three folks who are buying up property in Idaho and developing I don't know what do you develop in Idaho develop big potato farms sure yeah develop big communities of single family houses perhaps and at the other end of the spectrum you could have industrial or logistical space by an airport and all of that's technically real estate hotels are real estate office space is real estate so there's quite a lot of variety within that theme but it's nonetheless perceived as an asset class and yeah I think it can be anything that provides exposure to this unique set of market forces and if calling nature an asset class is what equips allocators with the right mental model with which to approach this space and say this deserves concerted effort and attention and X percent of my asset allocation maybe 80 or 90 maybe more realistically like one to two then we're moving considered to be convinced it has a shared set of risk return attributes and otherwise you know it's cross asset class and otherwise hard to characterize does anyone want to respond to that I'll provide a counter which is I think that nature presents risks opportunities across asset classes and cannot be constrained into one has been discussed there's so much variety in how you can talk and think about nature based investments I think we should encourage institutional investors to think about nature across their total portfolios and sort of take a more of an integration approach which doesn't preclude having car valves to say this is our nature bucket two percent of assets whatever but I think we should go farther to say within public equities what are my exposures to nature risk within my portfolio and how are we managing that I think it's a similar very similar playbook which we advocated for while I was at BlackRock which is to say take a total portfolio of climate risk what are you doing about it how are you setting targets and standards against each asset class and in a way that's sort of a in my mind at least a more direct theory of change because you're you're working within the existing mental models of the portfolio manager that sits on the real estate desk but now you're saying hey in addition to these risks you look at these numbers all day here's another set of data that you should be considering when factoring your investment decisions so this is sort of incrementally moving the needle but it's moving the needle against hundreds of trillions instead of just a small portion of that so maybe it's a yes and maybe it's not as computational as I thought well I'll jump in and provide kind of perspective on then the supply side the supply side being the people who are on the ground protecting nature restoring it and so I think that in order for a lot of capital to move there has to be this kind of trust and transparency and like oh this is how much you know nature is going to be restored here are the hectares here's what the trees are going to look like so all of that stuff is very very manual right now like again we're coming to the lens of carbon inventory so there's you know the way we measure carbon in trees is still the same way we measure it decades ago which is people out in the field with tape measures measuring different trees, throwing a stone measuring the trees in that like diameter and so this is all super manual and now with advances again in kind of the satellite technology and machine learning we're able to use different data sets so radar lidar in order to more accurately estimate the carbon on the ground without having to go there and so there's always going to be a role of people on the ground making sure that these projects are successful but there is also an element of automating what can be automated and particularly for the carbon markets this also means like taking the people what they do best which is planting trees and making sure they survive and helping them with the documentation to prove like hey this is how much carbon we've restored so I think there's a lot of work too that we're beginning to do to make sure that these are there is a very clear risk reward that everyone can articulate to the institutional investors I think that's a great point and exactly where I want to go next because I think there's just to wrap up this bit I think there is this challenge of both needing a little bit of a center of excellence on nature within an investment management context and also a shared you need something around which to orient everyone's collective efforts at the same time you need to embed that expertise and knowledge throughout your asset classes and throughout your team so I think yes and is probably a little bit where I'm landing but I didn't disagree with Mike but just to build off what you just said I think we've talked a bit about many of the drivers of momentum here but at the same time it is challenging right there is the there's many obviously it's an emerging solution set so a lot of the things that are being scaled are relatively like new businesses and solutions often times they're in emerging markets which are difficult to operate in they're cross asset class they and then there's also this reputational risk associated with some of the ongoing our evolving ability to assess carbon stock right and so I think that's exactly what you're getting at which is like technology is enabling us to ensure the quality here which is how we address some of that sort of ongoing concern which I think has been one of the things that's made investors sometimes more more dodgy but I'm I think we're can I just respond to that really quick so I think in my mind it calls for a need for increased transparency and accounting rules and standards for corporates with respect to carbon markets to date it's been sort of everything is treated as equal but I think there's an evolving there's some momentum around sort of having separate carbon ledgers for different types of carbon projects so distinguishing between an avoided deforestation project with you know a reforestation project for example and so if we can kind of fix the carbon accounting from a corporate perspective that may lend itself to increase investment in capital flows and some of the projects we know we need to invest in and bolster yeah absolutely so there's a bit about sort of the quality peaks here I think one thing I sometimes hear is like there is a emerging supply of capital that wants to invest in quality projects but is there enough supply so maybe David and Kelly I'll turn to you to talk a little bit more about the efforts you guys are taking to engender that quality supply yeah so definitely we know that there's not enough high quality supply certainly to meet the net zero targets that are coming the voluntary net zero carbon voluntary net zero goals that corporates have adhered to I would say that carbon markets of course in the name is optimizing for carbon and so particularly for reforestation projects we see that that is really what it's optimized for so we have plantations of invasive species that we know harm local diversity and so from what we saw in looking at the so called removals projects is that not very few of them are optimized for nature and so for that we our criteria includes a certain number of native species a certain percent of native species and making sure that they're regionally appropriate for that particular area that they're in and so there really wasn't enough supply that we thought was going to be needed for the demand which is why we started Pachama originals and we have a really great partner with Mercado Libre who's the largest tech company in Latin America and so we have been very lucky to partner with them and expand across Latin America for these types of projects and so that's really the kind of the beginning of what Pachama originals is and will scale to meet that supply but there's still a lot of work to be done maybe I'll pass it over to David for the rest. Yeah well I'm a fan of the Pachama originals product so if you can't endorse yourself I can. You know we've in the course of looking at projects that cut across this category of cut across categories agriculture agroforestry so integrating timber and agriculture ecosystem restoration and other forms of reforestation where of course kind of widening our funnel of potential opportunities so the broader you look the more you see specifically in the space in which Pachama operates there are a ton of grassroots NGOs that have a few decades of experience planting trees and restoring nature in a specific area there are indigenous groups that have thousands of years of applying traditional ecological knowledge to stewarding their landscapes around them and what they might lack is the knowledge or capacity to convert what they're already doing into a bankable project so they might be just kind of relying on grants from the nature conservancy or conservation international every year when they could be leveraging the markets and selling credits to corporations by just continuing to do what they're already doing and applying some digital MRV and knowledge on project development documentation and so I think it's critical that groups like Pachama are helping these grassroots NGOs bring more supply out of the market absolutely just on that David welcome any of you responding to this what are you seeing in terms of innovations or market initiatives to enhance bankability and long-term offtakes for a lot of these projects that are being developed I think so the corporates that I've been connecting with and speaking with that's sort of where they're at a lot of them are purchasing in the spot market and transacting for carbon credits that have already been issued I think what Pachama is doing is trying to initiate more projects but many corporates are hesitant to do that because we're in a changing regulatory environment and there's increasing scrutiny around corporate carbon purchases which has had a chilling effect in general and in a time when we need corporates to be looking in the future to say I'll pre-finance or I'll pre-purchase carbon credits for this project going out to 2030 to meet my goals a lot of folks are scaling back and so I think that's definitely where we need to go but there are some serious headwinds that we're facing I think in some cases it's a corporation signing a long-term credit purchase agreement and this is really taking a page out of renewable energies book so the solar and wind power purchase agreement was a huge factor in spurring enormous amounts of capital flowing into that space in the last decade because what it effectively did was if you had a utility with a triple A credit rating signing an agreement to purchase 25 years worth of electrons from you at an agreed upon price then me as someone coming in and financing a project up front only has to evaluate can you stay on budget and on time how quickly can you interconnect this project to the grid because that's what's going to affect my return same principles apply here I think sure corporations can use their balance sheets to pre-finance some projects but third-party capital is much more interested in coming in a project becomes much more bankable if they're instead using their procurement budget or some sort of long-term purchasing and I think this applies in carbon and there are a handful of mostly tech companies some forward-thinking companies that are signing longer-term carbon credit purchase agreements it's happening a little bit less in food and agriculture but whenever I get the chance to engage with the big food or commodities company and they're talking about regenerative agriculture and wondering what they can do to me that's all procurement like if you're willing to help a wheat farmer transition to regenerative and maybe buy wheat and some sort of legumes or other cover crop that they have to use as a result of adopting regenerative practices and if you can sign an agreement to purchase that over a long period of time then you're de-risking it for the farmer for the investor so I think there's some kind of slight behavioral changes that can go a long way in making these things more bankable for us yeah I agree with everything that's been said I think there was a long pause after your question because this is that is the biggest question right like we need finance and how does it work in the ecosystem so absolutely the power purchase agreements that were signed by first utilities and still utilities but also corporates is really huge and so definitely taking a page from that playbook and that's certainly the model that our corporates have been most interested in although there are definitely corporates who are willing to invest capital but I think in order to get the middle of the market we have to have the long-term offtake agreements in order to kind of move capital at scale fair enough and to sink answers to absolutely what is the big systems problem well so we have just a couple minutes left and so I have one more substantive question for our panelists and I'll encourage everyone to start mulling on we'll have the opportunity to do audience Q&A after this for a couple minutes so start stewing on your questions obviously our audience here represents a wide mix of players NBS or otherwise sort of an investment ecosystem and so the question I wanted to end on was how should investors think about their pathways towards investing in nature-based solutions over time and what is the role of different types of investors in capital in catalyzing this space so another big question and Mike I've done some thinking on this so I'm going to call on you first yeah no it's a great question and something I think about often I think in my mind in this room it starts with strategic philanthropy you know the smallest market but potentially potential for highest outsize impact from a social environmental perspective you know the climate works foundation where I used to say puts out an annual study of global philanthropic giving I think something like 780 billion last year less than 2% of that went to climate mitigation and an even smaller fraction of that so something like 0.02% of the global total went to nature and so I think for philanthropy it should be a sign that we need to increase giving in terms of research in terms of selfishly in terms of investment fund development concept research and with an eye toward scaling financial solutions in the sector so I think that's where I would start and of course there's some great work already happening with respect to standards and frameworks development but I think there's more that we have to do and then I think sort of moving up once we have philanthropic investment they can get research ideas to sort of an investable concept that's where impact investors come in who can provide concessionary capital to prove out concepts at a bigger scale obviously a slightly bigger market here more than a trillion in assets maybe 1.3 or so according to the GIN so yesterday in the opening session similar percentage is going to nature right now so I think it's just upping the level of investment from this category again folks that are willing to take innovative approaches to catalyzing investment solutions whether it's through de-risking, guarantees cap returns these are all things we need in order to eventually get to the big pots of money which is institutional markets hundreds of trillions of dollars available here and I think for the institutional investors in the room I would say what needs to happen now is more of an intense focus on standards and framework development with respect to incorporating nature as an investment risk it's not sort of an impact thing or a CSR thing this should be central to the investment community's thinking in terms of how should we approach our asset allocation and then within asset allocation approach our individual security selection should be developed we're still a ways off but by the time we've developed standards in institutional markets I think hopefully fingers crossed we will have gone a cycle through this kind of pipeline from philanthropy to impact to scaled approaches so that's my wishful thinking there you have it fantastic well I love to end these with a little bit of a lightning round to keep it light before we move to audience Q&A so I'm going to ask you each a couple of questions and you have to respond not in one word but really just one sentence with a period at the end of it so I'm going to start with you Kelly what is your favorite nature based solution well this one's obvious but for me it's the Amazon investing in the Amazon I became an environmentalist in sixth grade when I found out they were cutting down the Amazon and you know fast forward it's still happening today so certainly anything that protects the Amazon is where where my heart lies David anything on a degraded landscape because if we can show the ability to rejuvenate the damage that we've done then we can give people hope at a time that they need it was that a sentence? that was maybe multiple Simon Collins on there the Cousins and Ann's well today we're in San Francisco so I'm going to say street trees it's not the largest mitigation lever we have but I think it comes with so many co-benefits that are important protecting against urban heat island and of course there are important environmental justice implications of them and I just love identifying trees around the city it's true, your Bribuna Gardens in Salesforce Park case in point well thank you to our panelists for this excellent discussion I hope you guys all learned a thing or two with that we actually now have 10 minutes for audience questions so if anyone has a question we'd be able to take it over there My name is Jasmin Singh and I am a forestry project invested 1 million to build the copy case catalyzing investment in NBS to mainstream we are looking forward for so corporates will run with their own desires with the uptake and bankability so what type of financing available in the mainstream for refinancing these kind of scales everybody find a fairy tale that all needs the financing but at this stage if the communities on the parent line in the global south need financing what type of asset managers are coming on forward or considering agroforestry first five years no revenue and it's a 30 years period so what type of mainstream financing available to fund these kind of projects on the ground thank you so I'll repeat the question for the recording so the question was what type of financing is available for agroforestry other nature based solutions projects what's that for sure so this was another thing I didn't mention in the importance of calling nature an asset class positioning nature is a distinct asset classes because if we try to fit projects like this into the lens through which a typical private equity investor sees the world they're going to want to see a 25% IRR which nature can often not deliver if you're splitting the pie appropriately to investors indigenous groups developers etc and they're going to want to see liquidity in five to seven years and you're talking about cash flows beginning in year five which is more of a typical you know green field restoration project or project development so there needs to be patient forms of capital and there are several if more directly answer your question there have been again a handful of funds formed in the last three years or so most of which have a 15 plus year time horizon as a nod to the fact that these projects take a while to literally germinate and having a cutoff though is also a nod to the fact that if this is to become an asset class that a Yale endowment office would eventually invest in there does need to be a chain of liquidity and an ability for those who finance the project for the first 10 years to pass it on to someone who wants to own it for the next 18 to 20 and so that's something we're studying closely and planning for at the time that we're coming into projects and most of our peers are doing the same so I would say there's still there's still not enough capital clearly otherwise you would you would have an easier job I would imagine but I would say one response to your question is it's not mainstream but a particular type of capital you seek yeah sure and if anyone else wants to add to that yeah I'll just add that you know there is the capital and then us you know Pachama as in some ways intermediary like can specialize then in providing that data and information that that gets the patient capital more comfortable but I think it is true that there also needs to be people who understand and believe in these markets right I always kind of think about these investments of like left brain and right brain so certainly let's get the numbers let's understand what the risks are all of that stuff that's necessary but at the end of the day we're all humans and particularly as the impacts of climate change continue to the physical impacts of climate change continue to intensify I think there's also a need for people to feel like they're contributing to want to leave a legacy so I think that there is a lot of you know like yeah storytelling and speaking to the different part of the brain that I think is essential as well good response I think it's on your hand first yeah you actually yes we are we're looking into this and so California through Cal Fire has just initiated a large funding program focus on yeah greening school yard initiative I think the primary thus is going to be through public spending but as I mentioned earlier I think one of the gaps in this program is funding of maintenance and so something that we're examining is is there a role for city for urban carbon credits to play in basically financing the ongoing costs of associated with tree maintenance which can be sort of on a similar timeline as the credit cycle essentially and so that's a kind of a research concept that's in development now I've been doing some digging for the past nine months now haven't come across any other fund managers looking at this but I think more should because I think to your point such great need and it's not a mitigation solution but there's so many other benefits that come with this that we need to promote so I'll also mention so one of the carbon credit project that we currently partner with is called King County King County Rural Rural something and so that so the King County is from is where Seattle is based in Washington and they also have an urban on urban counterpart for that's getting funding through carbon market so you should check out that program so it's King County like urban forestry initiative fantastic sir can you maybe talk a little bit more about the role of the public sector and maybe I love the magic wand question right if you could wave a magic wand and do one thing that either the federal or state government could do to move this along what would it be you know we talked a bit about the historic investment through the RA and at the state level especially in California and I think magic wand I mean step one would be to stop subsidizing nature harmful activity which is to the tunes of hundreds of billions every year step two you know wishful thinking wand step two would be actually incentivize nature positive investment and you know three would be if we could develop standards in terms of accounting for carbon and nature simultaneously to encourage more corporate investment of the sector so these are all big ifs but that's where I'd start if I had a magic wand I think I'd make this Larry Fink's top priority because if the biggest shareholders in the world are telling the companies for whom they're the biggest position on their cap table that they need to start incorporating this then the needle will move faster so go back to where I came from yeah we have two magic wands right do we have time for another question or two yeah great our friend are they intended to shift behaviors to maintain the status quo by just saying hey I invested in this but I can just keep doing what I'm doing and it's contributing to all the problems in the first place so that's just a question is that the intent to shift behaviors not a basic question I think it's pretty complicated and so I guess the way that I would think about that is in short no we're not just trying to think going back to the role of philanthropy and catalytic capital there's in my mind the opportunity to set the foundation for a new standard in the way we think about monetizing these activities that doesn't fit into an existing sort of playbook or capitalist playbook but over time once those standards are set which incorporates the values that we've been talking about indigenous and local community involvement appropriate payment and compensation for landowners things like that and the model is developed and refined and scaled then yeah in a sense you do want it to be sort of a playbook that you can repeat and standardize because that's how you're going to generate more transactions and cash flow into the sector but we're not quite there yet so I don't approach this as sort of here's a way to make money as you're used to doing and thinking about investments I'm still sort of over here saying what's a new system that we can help create that has a sort of financial return and a new sort of risk profile but I think we're still collectively figuring out the details of that system at a project level and at a systems level so yeah I don't know if that answered your question directly but that's some immediate thoughts what a lot of this is doing is helping nature participate in the current economic system which is not a long-term fix because unless you know we're changing you can tap into people's minds by showing them a financial model that shows a project that restores an ecosystem, generates a reasonable risk-adjusted return over a 30-year period but it still doesn't solve the problem that we don't see we don't yet see nature degradation as an absolute last resort avoid at all costs we're not going to do any more of this and so if this category of investments, if this whole nature-based solution space isn't also changing hearts and behaviors then it's a failure so I think it's a critical ingredient, it was a great question maybe just talking on one more response to your question I do think that for instance in Galvanize we do have a public equity strategy where we're engaging with our management teams to help them both operate more sustainably as well as shift finance towards climate solutions and a pillar of that is in fact changing their existing behavior one thing that organizations like Ceres for instance have done great work on is deforestation free supply chains so I do think there is a role in a public equities context for engagement on shifting current behavior as one answered to your question too great I'm going to go with you it's almost time, thank you make my life easy so I'm a little discouraged to hear today that corporates are kind of pulling back away from action that's going to lead to sequestration in the future and nature based solutions in the future in favor of certainty and products that have that certification because I get the reporting standards there to hold them accountable but them kind of pulling back from the solution oriented approaches kind of counterintuitive so I guess my question is how is the conversation going to evolve in the future so that corporations are mixing the bag they've got the certainty that they can be held accountable to but they're also doing the more that we need to actually solve the problem I can jump in just to kind of repeat my understanding so discourage that kind of corporates are pulling back and how can we kind of shift the tide potentially so again from the perspective of carbon markets I mean carbon markets has long been fairly volatile and so I think this year with the negative a couple of negative press articles that there's been a bit of kind of like regrouping kind of trying to understand a little bit we really like SBTI's quote and that's the science based target initiative about no regress investment the time to invest is now and we're working with the best information that we have at the time and so there are corporates that are you know they're taking measured approach they want to make sure that they're making the right decision to avoid negative press but my hope is that the media tide will shift and start highlighting some of the really positive work that is happening with corporates but really on the ground I think a lot of the media articles like unfortunately don't talk about the people on the ground doing the hard work I mean for decades particularly for carbon markets I mean people were standing up projects without any guarantee of any revenue and so it's just it's really discounting the work and the impact that it's having on the community so I would really love to you know see more coverage on from that angle but I'm sure there's a lot of ways to answer that question so I mean just to build on that the a lot of the press undermine confidence of two of the biggest and most important players in carbon markets so the biggest non-profit registry and the biggest developer of carbon credits and it's an immature very consolidated market at this point so when folks are looking cynically at those two it's easy to understand why things have to slow down a little bit but there's a lot of nuance in the way that market actors are really interpreting the news and I think there's been there's been a deprioritization of the avoided loss type of credits that Mike mentioned have represented 97% of historical activity in carbon markets and an increasing priority of credits that are directly represent the direct removal of carbon through the planting and growing of trees which have represented a fraction of 3% I guess the you know native species reforestation has been a fraction of 3% and so the true the credits that represent true solutions for nature in terms of biodiversity and carbon and soil and water are still commanding a significant premium in the market so it's not going away but it is discouraging it's of course a little discouraging I think it's just a bit of a storm that will pass though I'll try to end on an optimistic note which seems like the dust will settle on the most recent but hopefully it will point the market toward quality and sort of these long term sort of removal projects and we've seen some activity just here in California recently Newsom signed a bill with respect to the voluntary carbon markets and increasing disclosure and reporting against those and so I think that's one small step but I think as accountability from a corporate perspective and then the kind of frameworks that we use to govern sort of the voluntary carbon markets evolve and mature that will point us to quality give more investors and corporates confidence to make those long term investments but too I think it's also hopefully a wake up call for other types of investors again like we've been saying impact investors or philanthropies to step in to provide catalytic capital in a market that's been drying up that we know that we need to promote and prop up