 Diolch yn fawr, beth felly rydw i'n ddweud dyma clywed arneddach felly nawr, ond mae'n ffwngion i ateb sydd wedi fynd bobl i gy facedwn i'ch ddweud am eich perryd wedi ddysgu, gan y ddyn nhw'n oedd yn drefnol am hwnnw. Mae ymlaen i'n Ddemol Crey a bobl fan y Cymru, mae wedi gwaith callw wedi bod hanesfer dyma, ac rwy'n gallu ei gaerwch ar gyfer y mynd i'r dyfyn, a hefyd yn gweld yn meddwl i'ch gweld ar y ddesg tapping ymgyrch. If it's alright we've obviously just heard from David on the amazing work he's doing at GNAFD, but if I could just ask my amazing panel to introduce themselves... who you are, what you do and what brings you here today. If you take my stuff with me. Yeah absolutely. I'm Nithga overall I'm the head of sustainable finance policy at WWF UK and unsurprising the WWF cares a lot about nature and we find ourselves in a a'r byw f beeping a lot of work on embedding nature in both financial and economic systems. We're really delighted with the increased focus on nature and with iChare, the nature working group is part of the UK government's Transition Plans task force. And we're really seeing momentum there for this more integrated approach between climate and nature I hope that we can get into some naughty issues today because it's not easy as a practitioner, but there are definitely things that companies can start doing. Thanks, the creator, Sebastian. Thank you, Simon. Sebastian Leep, I'm the CEO of NatCap. We're a nature data company. We're a spun out of Oxford University a few years back now to commercialise some research that had gone on there. And we really work with corporates and financial institutions to embed nature into their decision making. We've been working at this problem from a few different angles, but excited to shortly be releasing a TNF deal-lined nature products and spend a lot of time in the weeds of all the various dependencies that David's team have been working on to try and build something that's practical for companies and financial institutions. So I'll be bringing a bit of the practical lens to how companies are thinking about this. Thanks, Sebastian. Helen. Hi, I'm Helen Avery. I head up nature programmes at the Green Finance Institute. We were set up to help government and private sector come together to mobilise finance for climate at the time, and that's since has expanded to nature, and that's what I work on. So a bit of a sister company to CGFine that we focus mainly on financing green, how we get the money moving for nature is what my task is. We host the TNFD secretariat as well, and we do work on some greening finance things which I think we'll talk about a bit later. Brilliant, thanks. And just to frame the conversation, I guess I'd just like to pick up on a few things that I think David's very much warmed up already. So one is the sort of relationship, I think, of the sort of climate and the nature agenda. And I think what's been quite exciting over the last few years is we had, culture to sex really did put nature, I think, quite squarely into the climate change agenda. So we're beginning to see the climate folk beginning to edge into the nature space a little bit harder. And then of course what we had last December was the signing of the Global Biodiversity Framework in Cymru. And of course both the UNFCCC and the Global Biodiversity Framework have quite strong language within them around aligning all private sector flows around both net zero and the global goals on biodiversity. So we've kind of got the beginnings of these two multilateral agreements which I think for quite a long time have kind of held the space slightly separately and kind of created two conversations beginning to get convergence. But I don't think we're there quite yet and I'd be really interested to hear from the panellists how we get the climate and the nature brackets by diversity people to be having slightly more fluent conversations across the lines. Cos I certainly see in my own world that they're two slightly different universes but they have very different communities of practice, different languages. And so I'd be really curious to hear from you how from a data perspective you could help to unify us. I think what we're also beginning to see is movement. David mentioned the Network for Green and Financial System. We've also had statements from finance ministers increasingly looking at kind of the role of nature and obviously the Zescupta review is quite influential in that regard. So I think we're beginning to sort of see a translation of those big international legal frameworks into policy. And again, I think data can both help to the presence of these data can help to ensure policy makers that these things are possible at the same time that regulators need to be kind of setting out the demand for it. So again, I'd be quite curious to hear from the panel about how you sort of see data as part of a push and a pull in the conversation. And then I guess finally just be really interesting to think a little bit more about this issue of capability. And I think to your point, David, about sometimes the biodiversity piece and nature piece feeling like a bit of an afterthought. I've had quite a lot of conversations with financial institutions exactly along the lines that you described, but there's a bit of eye-roll. We're still sort of in the sense of climate thing. Could you just give us a bit of space? And exactly, I mean, I loved your language about Mother Earth not waiting, right? And I think how we managed to accelerate the conversation. So I'd be really interested to hear from people about time. So this kind of balance, I think that we're striking where we need to make sure that we've got systems that are effective, robust and accurate to avoid greenwashing on the one hand and incompetence. On the other hand, all of these crises are really urgent. So I guess those are some of the sort of questions that I feel that I'm struggling with and looking to our panel to guide us through. Helen, would you be up for just giving us a bit of a description? I think what's helpful about this discussion is to translate that big picture that David's been talking about into some real stuff that's happening in the real world on the ground. And I know that GFI is absolutely vital in this space. I'd just great to hear from you what you all up to. Thank you. So I think, first of all, the way that we've started framing it, and I've only started framing it this way in the last few months, and it speaks to sort of David's point and your point about needing to get climate nature put together, is that how do we transition the economy to one that values and invests in the natural environment? And then you could put under that the ecosystem service it provides. And I sort of see climate fitting under that umbrella, and then you could go deep into species and biodiversity as well as under that. Ultimately, that's kind of what we're focusing on. And it was sort of heartening that in the latest green finance strategy, there was a lot more nature. I was talking to someone from deaf who mentioned, nature was mentioned perhaps once or twice in the first green finance strategy you mentioned. I think over many tens of times in the second one. So we're starting to see it come together, although it is climate here and nature here and not natural environment has won. So there are a couple of things we do, because we're sort of focused on greening finance today. I won't talk about the things we do on financing green, although happy to later, particularly in the context of farming and some of the data that could get some money moving. And to be fair, it's quite difficult to separate greening finance and financing green. In the end, it's all about getting those flows through to the natural environment. But there are a couple of things. One is, and it talks to the point Andrew made. You might not be familiar with this, but we have a group. I'm going to just get this wrong. So I don't run this group. By the way, it's my colleague Land, Nature and Adaptive Systems. It's an advisory group. It's actually an extension of the UK green taxonomy. We run the advisory group for the green taxonomy. And this LNAS, as it's so jauntly called, is actually looking at how we can expand the taxonomy to actually identify some of the descriptions that clarify sustainable agricultural investments and sustainable fisheries. And then we'll be looking at forestry as well. And that's such an important piece of work, because we host the UK National Consultation Group for the TNHD. And a lot of the feedback we've had from asset managers is, well, actually, how do I start saying what is a positive impact? So the taxonomy is really important for that, as will transition plans be for nature. And then the other piece I just mentioned is a piece of work we're doing with Bank of England and Oxford and Reading and also UNEPWCMC and NISA. Essentially, we're overseeing a project of analysis that will give a guide to the material risk to UK financial stability born of nature-related dependencies. It's super complicated. And as you can imagine, it's not going to be a one and done with this piece of analysis. But there were two reasons that we offered to lead this project. One is we felt that the corporate community in the UK wasn't really, they were putting nature after lunch, basically. In fact, probably maybe next year's lunch. And we needed to send a signal that actually there's material risk and that UK government and regulators are on it. And the second is that Bank of England needs some support. All central banks and financial institutions want to understand how they're going to start analysing material risk from dependencies on nature. It was too early for us to look at impacts for reasons that CNFD's not being adopted widely at the moment. So I think they're the couple of things I'm happy to pick up on them. Thanks, Helen. That's really, really helpful. And I think part of, for example, what your last bit speaks to is both that kind of building capacity issue, but also thinking where are those big levers to make sure that the agenda's more fully integrated and the Bank of England's clearly one. It's good to see that they're kind of building on the work that I know was done in Holland and I think in France. And even in Malaysia, I think they've done that. Yeah, there's a few central banks now that have started. Very exciting. Cool. Nikita, do you want to speak a little bit from a WWF perspective about a nature positive economy, I think is sort of on the left of many people and kind of understanding the risk is one part of that. But could you just speak more broadly about what WWF vision is for a nature positive economy? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, nature positive economy is a term that's used, but it's probably just worth spelling out exactly what it means. So it means there's more nature in 2030 than we have in 2020, basically, that we have halted the alarming decline of nature that we currently see and reverse that by 2030 so that nature is on a path to recovery. And a nature positive economy is an economy that facilitates that process rather than the current economy we have, which is nature negative. Our whole economic system has been built around extracting from nature rather than regenerating it. So you raised a really good question right at the start of your comments around this whole companies are still getting used to climate-related disclosures. There's a lot to kind of get your head around. What's the case to look at nature now? So we've found that the best way to sort of get cut through on this is just two really simple facts. So nature is responsible, the loss of nature is responsible for 23% of global emissions. And nature has the potential to sequester over a third of our carbon emissions. And so it makes very little business sense not to look at the two together. And that came through loud and clear in David's comments earlier. Now what are the kind of opportunities, aside from the kind of climate implications of nature recovery, if we really are thinking about a nature positive economy, all the opportunities that come from essentially rewiring an economy to be nature positive are abundant. Kind of in the same way that people have rightly got quite excited about the zero carbon transition or the net zero transition. We need to be thinking about a net zero and nature positive transition. Obviously, TNFD is an absolutely keystone of companies work to align the private sector with nature positive. But at least we've been finding there's a little bit of a narrative, which is TNFD is there to focus on TNFD, that's great, we're doing nature positive. But TNFD, it's like saying, or if we've done TCFDs, the equivalent of being doing a net zero transition. They're absolutely not the same thing, that it's an essential part of a full transition. And so one of the things that WWF has been thinking about is, well, if you think about what we've put in place for climate in order to facilitate a net zero transition and you compare what exists for nature, the nature pieces of that are really still quite nascent. So we have a Paris Agreement, obviously several years ago we've just had the GBA. We have a sectoral pathways set out at a global level. The IEA has done work on what a net zero transition looks like at a sectoral level at a global level. And then you get national sectoral pathways. That doesn't yet exist for nature. So nobody actually has a clear idea of what a nature positive transition looks like. That's work that WWF is actually trying to progress and provide an illustrative version of. And I know the World Economic Forum and WBCD are also doing work in that space. And then the breakdown of those GBF goals into metrics targets that are actionable at a company level. That is where CNFT is going to be so helpful and that's just happening. So we're a long way off actually integrating nature into our financial and economic decision making. I should have said also aligning multilateral and development finance and public finance with nature positive and climate goals. It's not like we're all there on climate either by the way. We've ticked all of those boxes on climate but we are much further ahead on climate than we are with nature. But it makes very little business sense and I'll just end with one kind of final anecdote from our chairing of the nature positive, the nature group of the Transition Plan Task Force. There are some companies particularly in the agricultural space who actually in agriculture it's kind of a no brainer that you've got to think about nature in the same breath that you think about climate. And they're actually saying you know what it's actually harder for us to think about climate only or nature's intersection, only the part of nature that intersects with climate. It's like this weird splitting of the two. It makes more sense it's easier for us to think about climate and nature together. That isn't a whole tree for all sectors but I think there's a lot to learn from a sector like that. I'll leave it there but yeah. Thank you. Thank you that was really helpful and maybe that will provide a bit of a segue into just asking David really about and what you've I think about a question for David which is Nicky, I think you've articulated how in order to drive a transition in terms of alignment of financial flows you need disclosure mechanisms but you also need a whole ecosystem of other things to happen around that whether that's transition plans, whether it's around the way that the banks are stress testing etc. And David I'd be keen, your sort of analysis Nicky was that that kind of ecosystem of institutions remains quite nascent in the nature space compared to quotes the climate space. And David it's just interesting to see how to better understand how TNFD is working with others in order to kind of build that broader ecosystem that will help to accelerate the transition if that makes sense. Yeah it's been very interesting listening to comments from my panel here because what we're actually talking about is how to create change. And if you look at climate where I think you said that we're further ahead we're woefully behind where we need to be on climate. So clearly the approach that we've taken for climate hasn't really worked. 20% of public companies have a net zero transition plan aligned to the Paris Agreement of 1.5 so that's after seven years so could we wait another 28 years for the other 80% to catch up? No we can't. So we have to think this. I mean I was lucky enough to run a large business and have this challenge of regulation coming at me and thinking what on earth do I do in the three minutes I've got to look at this problem. And I recognise at the time when I was hit with TCFD we have an extraordinary capacity to make things that should be relatively simple, complicated. And we have an army of people putting terms around this and talking about transition plans and all these other areas and I think what we should do, the theory of fear doesn't work. So I've told so many people that we've lost 69% of all of our nature and biodiversity and that we lose a primary forest every six seconds the size of a football pitch. I mean it just washes off people. They say like yeah yeah but someone else will deal with that. That's not the way it is, that's someone else. So I don't think the fear tactic is working. I think what's required if I were leaving a large company now is I've reset and say right, forget climate, forget nature, let's re-look at our business model let's understand our total and comprehensive dependencies on nature including atmospheric pollution, including atmospheric CO2 and temperatures embody that too and understand how over the next 30 years I'm going to make that sustainable because I know the amount of plastic I'm producing isn't sustainable. I know the amount of water I'm using is not sustainable and I know that the way that I'm removing land maybe not directly but indirectly through my supply chains because I'm a supermarket selling meat stocks is not sustainable and I would look at that, I would use the GBF as my guide there are 23 targets, there's really a few that really matter land use change is right at the top because that has been proven by the scientists to be the thing that removes biodiversity more than ever and simply say where in my business model am I changing land or ocean use and where do I need to stop that and change it there's some really good examples of this, one of the companies I most admire that's done this is Tetrapac, I actually started work in the packaging industry many years ago and when I started in the packaging industry we were inventing new forms of plastic and celebrating how clever it was a little, what do we know, 13 years later we've now polluted everyone's bloodstreams with this stuff but Tetrapac have created a completely 100% nature based packaging system they started this journey three years ago recognising that there are going to be enormous demand like many things that come out of Scandinavia that tend to be more long term and forward thinking and they now can produce billions of packaging items that are completely produced by nature and will buy a grade into the system and they reckon this is worth $10 billion of value to them and I think we've got to sell the opportunity of sustainability and not get bogged down in these endless ESG debates and other areas and start as companies thinking about what's the opportunity to transition from where I was before to where I am, this point about we're further behind we're actually not further behind on nature I actually think we're further ahead and here's the reason, regenerative farming was not cooked up in a lab four years ago it was invented thousands of years ago natural products were invented thousands of years ago and techniques like this are actually well established, well proven and understood what we've done is we've mechanised in the last few years everything that we possibly can and now we're realising that whilst that was fantastic for productivity it wasn't necessarily good for those resources that were exhausting so we've almost got to go back to some of these methodologies and think how can I make them as productive as my mechanised version but less harmful and therein lies the investment opportunity I think I talk to a lot of the investment managers there's a lot in the room I talk to a lot of people of pollination and the other areas about some of the nascent areas, alternative meats, vertical farming, regenerative farm and carbon soil offsets, all of these areas I think we've got to start talking about the positive areas and how they align to the GBF goals which are very simple in how they describe the problem and we as TNFD can help because we've published that standard disclosure framework that indicates according to the GBF how you're doing so if you're a financial investor and you say to a company well I want to invest in you but I want to know that your business model is going to be around in 10 years because of these sustainability pressures we give you a hope that that's there so that's how we're working with people but I think we can't take the same time that we've taken on climate we simply can't afford the time the nature loss that we're experiencing now is far more severe than climate change on its own a lot of it's produced by climate change and so we have to find different ways of encouraging people to change as opposed to using some of the methods of yield I love that sort of lifting it out of an apparently sort of very geeky techie piece into like how do we think about change how do we engage folks so that they kind of want to act on this agenda Sebastian just sort of riffing off that a little bit it'd be really interesting to understand how the data that you're generating is helping to articulate not just the risks associated with harming nature but also the opportunities for nature positive investment could you tell us a bit more about your work? Yeah absolutely so if we look at where the landscape is today into the companies trying to embed nature in decision making I think as David alluded to there are a few pockets of sectors and geographies that are leading so France has had regulation on biodiversity for a while their companies unsurprisingly are good ahead mining has had regulatory pressures and oil and gas and so there are some learnings we can take from that and then agriculture is a mixed bag in some ways very much ahead in some ways very much behind so I think we can take learnings from select bits of the world and select sectors if we zoom into how a UK financial institution is embedding nature in decision making which is maybe more relevant for this crowd I think we are at the stage where it's on the agenda it's getting traction, people know it's coming and it has to start this year I think just as you said the typical response that we get when we're engaging companies is I've not even done scope 3 yet how on earth am I supposed to start with TNFD and there's five annexes and I only have however many hours in the day so I think the first place you start is there is some measurement work to try and cut through the complexity and just allow a few areas of focus to come out and that doesn't have to be super complex and there is a very simple 2x2 if you're a big financial institution a bank or an asset manager ranking sector a sectoral materiality and prioritisation is often somewhere where you might start and that can just be looking at impacts, dependencies the bubble can be the size of your exposure ING were the first to come out with this a bunch of banks have started that and that's the first kind of gateway into this which is just thinking about where my portfolio is this real and material often it's agriculture, maybe it's forestry, utilities, mining but it will quickly slim down the area of focus to just a few sectors I think a second way of cutting this is then the dependency or impact lens which is where the dependencies are impacting your portfolio most material HSBC did some interesting work with that lens finding that water dependency was most material for them and looking at the non-climate related water dependency of heavy industrial companies in their portfolio and finding there was a lot of material impact on credit risk and then I think another lens is geographic because nature is so place based what are the bits of the world where my operations on my portfolio are most closely aligned so I think that's where companies question in terms of how we help and how we're helping companies is today we're at a stage of how do we sift through all of this noise and just focus on a few areas to get started and then once you have that the things that come next are okay what's our theory of change to actually make a difference on the ground what do we report this year versus next year to our stakeholders how do we start setting some targets that are realistic but also inspiring so that's the kind of building blocks what we've decided to do is really go deep on agriculture just because that's where the overwhelming nature destruction is being driven from and in particular try to create data that's relevant at the site level that's sensitive both to the precise location of assets and how they're being managed and I think there's a risk that we're hearing from some asset managers that we're stuck in a bit of a loop whereby if you operate only at the portfolio and at a very high level it's very hard to translate that into actual changes on the ground and to make a difference and all of this agenda actually often boils down to a few relatively basic things on the ground within agriculture it's things like cover crops it's things like no-till, it's things like sensible manual management it's things like moving away from monocropping towards agroforestry and other farming techniques and if you start to address agriculture you just address a lot of it so what our data is trying to do is move beyond just a portfolio country level, sector level, high level assessment of where your impacts are and helping a company measure precisely in their supply chain or precisely in their portfolio at the asset level what are the impacts and dependencies and as a result of that what are some of the things you could be doing differently That's super helpful Sebastian, thank you and I guess part of what you're already emphasising is that the data that you're producing is really helping to tell company's stories about both where they're carrying risks but also to articulate where there's more opportunity and Helen I know you do a lot of thinking around how to work with corporates to identify where the big opportunities are in terms of investment and just be interesting, you've given some very concrete examples Sebastian about how to pull out from this very detailed data where are those big opportunities, where are the risks How is that playing out in your world? In terms of working with corporates to see whether there are opportunities Are you saying that corporates are beginning to see that there is an opportunity there as well as a cost because I think part of those things that David picked up right in his intervention at the beginning at the moment is quite easy to free ride on natural capital so kind of switching that around about where the investment opportunity is for doing the quotes the right thing is just quite difficult so how are you feeling that that story is unfurling and what do we need to do to make it more compelling I'd be interested to hear what Nitaker and David say but my understanding from my discussions with the Olympic Corpus is that's not really on their radar the opportunity side we're just getting through on the risk side but the opportunity side isn't there because that piece of Bank of England work that we wanted to do had this primary motive from outside that had a different motive from Bank of England really just to start getting out in front of UK corporates to say let's start, the theory of change is if you start to realise there's a risk and you'll start to invest and there's an opportunity and that's where you need transition plans and a taxonomy to show you what you could be investing in so I think it's early days and I would say it's a big gap in the way I put plastics as a gap I put the opportunity, a piece as a gap I put nature restoration rather than net offsets as a bit of a gap at the moment I mean there are pockets so for example we have sort of land based projects in the UK we work a lot on through supporting the natural environment investment readiness fund and a similar investment readiness funding in Scotland that's developing projects on the ground of nature restoration that will attract investment but that can only work if everyone jumps to the investment side isn't it amazing we'll have billions coming in from asset management it only works if there's a corporate set in the middle buying the credits whether they're carbon credits, biodiversity credits biodiversity net gain or nutrient neutrality it only works for that and there's actually a gap right at the moment we have a big supply we have all this focus on investment and then we have the demand in the middle there's a big gap and that's just sort of real asset nature restoration my understanding of private equity is that it's becoming more interesting some of the nature especially on the architect side and the tech and data side is really interesting to companies and investment and that's all I'm seeing but I'm really keen to hear others seeing the key to an endowment yeah it's really interesting anything I've heard from companies around the opportunity has been around carbon credits and biodiversity credits which really worries me because that is a market in and of itself and that's great that should exist but it's really interesting as having a conversation with a corporate that's both an insurer and an investor and we were asking about how programmes run by WWF that would ultimately reduce flood risk wouldn't that be an opportunity on the insurance side and interestingly through what transpired from that conversation is the only way we can think of making this sort of project commercial rather than philanthropic is the credit the biodiversity or the carbon credit side of things because we don't yet we can't yet model it into showing that there would be a benefit in the time horizon that's relevant for our insurance business and that was quite a shock to me I was like and that is what I'd say is the difference between a nature positive economy and finding one small way to monetise or value nature a nature positive economy would mean that we were that we had a way to value the ecosystem services of a coastal wetland in reducing insurance premiums and therefore it would make commercial sense for an insurer to invest in that wetland that currently doesn't translate at a company level and I'm not the expert here it has something to do with time frame maybe if you've got more to add from some of the kind of quantification of risks that you're doing but I found that really fascinating but it's an interesting case example if you think about what would it take to make the UK a nature positive economy one of the problems we have is mother nature is very connected but our systems are not so a good example one of our members is Holson the big manufacturer's construction products including a lot of concrete which as we all know has big implications on both CO2 emissions and the natural environment and they're creating materials that rather than just throw water off actually absorb water now for the last 50 years we've made big concrete structures and roads and other things and all the water that comes from them we throw them down a drain as fast as we can and then we're all surprised when Thames Water can't deal with the amount of water they have and throw sewage in the rivers and we quite rightly blame Thames Water but you have to look at this connected system and think isn't the problem upstream from this we're treating our land and our built environment so that it throws off water as fast as it possibly can why not rethink that the problem is the economics for that because the person who benefits isn't necessarily the person who pays and so this only works in a market environment where you have government policy and intervention and rules that kind of help it along because I think left to its own natural systems if you excuse the pun we won't reflect the connectivity of nature with the connectivity of a financial and economic system that's where government policy can actually intervene and help us with rules and regulations for example should new buildings collect rainwater as well as collect solar in countries like Switzerland that are I think far ahead of the UK on this kind of issue they're thinking and acting on those kind of rules that mean that supply-demand characteristics are pushed into action and we saw this with the great success with offshore wind offshore wind would not be as successful as it is today if it hadn't been subsidised and because of the subsidies huge investment went into it and lo and behold 10 years later we've now got offshore wind is cheaper to produce electricity than it is other sources we need those kind of interventions from government as well because we can make a lot of efforts as financial institutions and corporations but it will take a long time to reflect that connectivity of mother nature in the systems that we're actually building so I think that's where we need to but not just with each other but with government policy and help inform and help and support them and thinking how to bring a connected system together that is currently very fragmented that's great I'm sure that there'll be folk in the room who've got questions for our panel as well what I might do is just take two or three if that's alright does somebody have a microphone oh thank you so much so I think I'm making you come all the way to the front but there's a lady here and then there's a gentleman at the back and then Chris okay we'll start with Chris then so I wanted to come back to this point around investment in nature positive and opportunities we, at impact so if the impact is management we invest in the transition to stable economy we've got quite a lot of companies we're investing in that address the drivers of biodiversity loss you can kind of consider alternatives to deforestation or alternatives to using natural resources out of out of oceans and the like but we we just commissioned a project with imperialist and published a report this week where we were going out to look for companies that were doing biodiversity positive investments and it was pretty slim peckings and it is quite apparent so we found case studies there's an insurance potential insurance one there's one in the energy sector out there one in cities another in the agricultural chain and one in water and they all looked on their face like these were positive biodiversity investments but there are two insights there first one is none of them were investing in biodiversity as the main driver of the investment it was all to do with co-benefits that actually outweighed the biodiversity positive impact people are actually quite shy about talking about this stuff and being transparent about the benefits to the company and the benefits to nature it feels up with so when you say we're ahead of the game I guess in that respect people are still not really talking about the positive opportunities so my question to the panel is I think you've alluded to the role of public policy here but it feels to me there is a massive role for public policy to showcase the kind of society that you're suggesting what do we need to do in terms of sectoral transformations but also just to try to address this market failure there is a huge market failure here but we're not going to get anywhere near addressing the problem unless we tackle that head on so you're no longer in debt for us so you don't have to answer the question on debt for the market but isn't that where we need to be focusing a lot of our attention is how we fundamentally get nature included in valuations thank you if I could just take two or three questions a lady next to you also had a question would you mind introducing yourself I just wanted to just for clarification what is the main opportunity base that you're looking at across this area in climate for a long time is it actually revenue from offsets because I think we need to be clear about and I'm also interested in how you deal with that because obviously you've got fossil fuel emissions that are in a relatively cat to geological store and then you've got a non-cat vulnerable terrestrial oceanographic ecosystem and selling between the two raises a lot of controversial issues that have been controversial all the time so just very interested in how you see this in this new initiative so amazing panel we've got a question on what's the policy framework is the opportunity primarily around offset or other and then there was somebody else there was a lady in the middle whisper and then we'll take that cluster and then we'll go to the gentleman at the back there's a lady just there and then so we'll come to you in just the second if we may hi, great contributions is up to you I'm still a little bit of a care of doing my PhD at Copenhagen Business School and I'm doing it for my sins can't apply and it's for an adaptation so I'd like to ask the panel just very simply if you think so I've done a lot of I've done three tests at the Singapore London and sort of the New Orleans and then I've interviewed for the research and Copenhagen and interviewed over three city investors from across all different parts of the ecosystem in the same ecosystem a lot of data basically the investment in adaptation for minimal and taking the words of investors for all types people are interested but the sections and behaviours are forming huge barriers so I was just wondering it's really important to when you talk about climate that you clear that it's adaptation as well as mitigation because I call it now the Cinderella and she's fallen off the wagon and desperately trying to get back on board because I do also wonder from the responses I've got that they're in competition that adaptation is competing for safe finance that's available for mitigation that's available for nature and they are all interconnected but you might want to find projects that are conventional and there are examples around the world that can deliver on all of those three together so I just wanted to know for the panel when you say climate are you explicitly mentioning adaptation as well? Thank you so much for flagging the adaptation term I think nature's got a key role to play I think I'm going to take this little cluster because they're all such great questions David do you want to say something on the sort of market failure and policy framework? It's great to hear from impacts as they are one of the probably longest serving companies looking at investing in nature positive when I first got this role having come from the background I had recognising that I didn't know that much about some of these issues I actually spent two days on a farm on a regenerative farm in Salisbury and this farmer was fantastic for giving me his time of walking me around the place for two days but also just the knowledge he had and the understanding he told me something really interesting which I think we've got to learn from which was organic dairy was invented 30 years ago it uses many of the same principles in terms of pesticides and antibiotics in other areas but they're slightly different we shouldn't confuse the two it's better for the environment it's got lower CO2 and it's better for your body and yet it's only 5% of UK demand after 30 years and why is that? and the market failure here is that the market looked at organic products and decided that they would be a premium and I had this conversation in New York as well and it's exactly the same it's 4% in the US it's about 40% in Austria and Germany and he said to me if there's one ask of the government and regulators if you have a voice is let's not make the same mistake with regenerative farming let's find a way of making this actually a better way to produce food that's incentivised by policy and that the supermarkets and others don't create a premium price that destroys the market for regenerative farming just as it's reborn to do it I think that was a really interesting case example of where public policy and consumer demand one of the GBF requirements by the way is not just for disclosures by large companies and financial institutions but information to be made available clause for free and information to be made available to consumers and I'm fascinated how this is going to work with consumer labels today and they're overwhelming already but I wonder whether WWF will help us to put a nature positive stamp on a porous soap I'm not sure if that's the goal I think this is an important part of this equation how does government help consumer attitudes as well as others to address a market failure because we're going to go through the same failure with regenerative farming as we did with organic if we're not careful if I could just add one point to that if thinking about this the answer to this problem and this works at the systemic level all within one sector if we take ag is you can think of a bunch of solutions lined up on an abatement cost curve just like we did with climate to some extent and there are some that are negative and have a negative cost and some that have a positive cost and so government policy is clearly needed to help us create the markets the subsidies, the incentives to address all of those levers over the next ten years that have a positive cost associated with them one of the things I found most interesting working closely with food companies and agricultural institutions in the last few months is how many of these farming levers do have a negative cost associated with it written so far is that what we're asking farmers to do at the core is reduce input costs reduce the consumption of fertiliser reduce the consumption of pesticides and that does have an impact on yield but it has an impact on cost and so I think what regenerative farming ends up looking like in some situations is higher profitability and lower yield and so which has its own systemic issues but just to say that on that cost curve there is a chunk of work that we can already start doing now which is culture it's about companies setting clear targets and clear asks of farmers and then there's a bunch of work that does need the kind of policy intervention that you're looking to. Helen, do you have if you're honest a question that we had around the kind of interplay between the sort of climate and sort of offset world and the biodiversity world and I think this is a sort of an area that's quite live and fraught and something that I'm struggling with but engaged in quite a lot at the moment and just wondered how you sort of see is there an opportunity as well as a trade off like how do you see that debate working through? So my understanding from your question was that is the only opportunity on offsets or is it the opportunity broader than that? How do you see yourself in the offset question? I think it's worrying because you don't get to net positive if we just focus on offsets it is however a mechanism at the moment for funding restoration that's how I see it I mean ultimately the opportunities that we want are actually companies transitioning through their supply chains moving into regenerative agriculture companies that we're going to use for agriculture new improvements in water consumption things like that but I just don't know how we're going to get to nature restoration like how do you get the billions moving for nature restoration the only way I can see you doing that is in some sort of initial offset market Now biodiversity net gain is obviously a net gain of biodiversity credits we're not going to do offsets my understanding is that it will be net gain I'm not a big fan of offsets and I can see you nodding your heads it was obviously how you feel but if we can find another way of channeling private sector capital into nature restoration in the next five years I'll take it but at the moment that's how I see them working they're absolutely imperative for the next five years otherwise where's the money coming from but I mean that's my opinion I suspect we could have a whole other panel for much of the day and night on this as well Nikita on the adaptation question just interested around you know just as we often talk about mitigate we talk about climate and nature we often sort of separate out mitigation adaptation and useful to hear from you on how you see those connecting Yeah I mean I actually think this is really where like nature comes into its own because a lot of nature based solutions are killing there's a terrible pun for nature are tackling multiple challenges at the same time so your nature based solutions would ideally be making a landscape more resilient to climate change i adaptation making those communities that benefit from that landscape therefore more resilient and mitigating at the same time while obviously improving the state of nature and so I actually think that there's a kind of neat link to the point around where's the commercial opportunity for nature if and this comes back to my kind of insurance example that if we were able to price in the fact that in five to ten years time an area would be significantly adversely affected by extreme weather events and climate change it really builds the case to invest in nature because often nature based solutions would help us adapt so I and coming back to the kind of policy point I think it's a real danger that both companies and government think about effectively what their climate strategy is their mitigation strategy is think about what their nature strategy is because obviously GBF requires countries to come up with national plans and then separately you have an adaptation plan and it kind of doesn't make any sense that the three of those are separate plans the good thing is is that from the perspective of corporate transition plans the transition plans task force is quite clear that the transition plan is meant to be a plan for a company to both align itself with kind of the climate transition as well as adapt to a changing climate but there is also an adaptation nature group in there as well because it obviously needs to be given more weight but yeah I definitely think that this is really where nature comes into its own all nature based solutions come into that own so it feels like we need a mother earth plan that's kind of matching all of these things together there's a gentleman here and a gentleman at the back and I'm going to just close down questions after that and then just ask the panel to build in their replies to their final remarks gentlemen here Thank you Ross for going back it's a question for you David fund market investors have only one question who is asking the money and what's their credit worthiness because the risk of default is the only thing that matters to them and the question aligned with that is who has legal ownership and leverage in this arena and my ask to you is have you consulted with local authorities and cities who firstly are credit worthy and secondly have leverage through planning consent to deliver net zero and D in FD Great and let's hold that question and there was the gentleman at the back Hello I'm Bruce Howard and in partnership with the Green Finance Institute we're running the Nature Finance UK conference this September Nature rich places are usually not devoid of people there are social considerations here I just wondered whether the panel could comment on how we can avoid in a sense the social risk of a nature positive economy particularly with those who look after land a little bit worried about relationships with corporates and financial services organizations they don't know Brilliant so that's the idea of a just transition in the nature space David can I invite you to ask a question specifically on TNFD and then I might just ask a panel The short answer is no we haven't yet because we haven't started that work as I said we're going to do bond work later so I wouldn't pretend that we've actually done that you're right that the credit worthiness is dependent on your ability to pay off the debt and your ability to pay off the debt is based on ecosystem services that you rely upon so if you are dependent on water and you've borrowed against that dependency you've got a credit issue so this is why Moody said we've got a large billion dollar number I can't remember exactly what it was of risk because of these issues so this is why the rating agency is just starting to look at it and why we will do it next not now The society question is a brilliant one The average farm I think is below 4 hectares or something in the world you cannot do nature without looking at local communities I'll just answer your question with one real example of a trade-off Have a look at what's happening in Holland reducing the amount of nitrate fertiliser that can be used because they've polluted the soil it's like putting the heroin in the soil and it keeps it going and going so controls come into restrict mass protest because of course that transition from reliance on fertilizer to a more organic approach takes 5 to 10 years and a good example a real example of where you have to think about this transition with the communities who are stewards and dependent on nature and this is why this is difficult that's a good point Thank you Nikita, do you want to talk a couple of words on the Just Transition point? The Just Transition concept is starting to be fleshed out for climate it's obviously been a live concept when talking about the climate transition it's no different for a nature-positive transition I think the interesting thing about nature is that it's very location-specific in some ways and actually there is possibly more of an opportunity to engage local communities in restoring nature than there is obviously for climate as people has been very prominent in the negotiations at GBF and they are kind of mentioned explicitly I believe in the framework and so I think in fact local communities are often more likely to be the stewards the best stewards of local landscape often so I think there's a real opportunity there Thank you, Sebastian final reflections from you on the social point is that a lot of the most important nature management practices a lot of the folks who are actually protecting, managing nature and enabling those ecosystem services are doing so for free because a lot of those ecosystem services are unpriced and so I think as we move towards a world of this perfect policy nirvana where all of these nature markets are properly functioning and these ecosystem services are priced and people are properly compensated then there should be a mass transfer of wealth eventually from the industrial of north to the globalised south and from other sectors towards agriculture and towards essentially marginalised groups who have been doing this work for free who shouldn't be doing it going forward so I think nature as an agenda actually provides quite an inspiring framework through which to justify the transition of some of this wealth over the long term and Helen? Just speaking about the UK and I agree with all the comments made on global I think this is the moment for social, I'm really excited because to what's been mentioned before this is a moment where we can sort of shoehorn in some of those equality issues that we've just kind of left to the side for a long time through nature we're working a lot with some projects in Scotland to really learn from them on some of their and I know you know them Bruce too with you with them there are some amazing projects that are making money that are very ethical around their offsets and their accesses net gain that are giving back 13% to the community and are selling carbon for £65 a tonne can actually be done if you just participate with community rather than just tick a box on community engagement and we're really keen to see UK government start to put some principles around this, they have mentioned it in the nature markets framework because we are going to be starting to be asked a question who's making the money and what's the social impact of these nature projects I'm just talking markets, I'm not talking about the broader transition with farmers so I'm all for it, I think this is the moment for social That's a great point to kind of pull the thread of the conversation together huge thanks to the panel I've learnt loads as ever from all of you I guess my takeaways are very much around how we try to kind of move from seeing climate and nature in these different silos what does that mean really practically all the way down from how these different treaties are set side by side but also in terms of data requirements about making sure that we're kind of seeing this transition in a social context not just in a sort of data and climate and nature context and also just really paying as much attention to the opportunity as the risk lots of really big themes and huge thanks to all the panel