Nature: Making the Priceless Valuable
The last three decades have been a time of tremendous breakthroughs in harnessing the power of the global economy to bring value to nature. We've seen a proliferation of market-based instruments like carbon markets, sustainability certifications (think FSC-certified timber and Rainforest Alliance coffee), biodiversity markets, investments in "natural infrastructure," stormwater credit trading, and more, come into play.
But these instruments operate in silos and often struggle to scale. There’s little cross fertilization, low transparency, and not enough sharing of experience across markets or geographies. No one market is a silver bullet for bringing value to nature; we need a whole portfolio of solutions. Otherwise, these tools will never deliver finance for a green transition as initially hoped.
So this year at Climate Week, we’re bringing together experts from across carbon markets, water markets, biodiversity markets, ESG policy, government, tech, and finance to help drive that vision. We’ll preview new tools and data that can help us build a mental map of the entire universe of markets and market-like tools that put the power of the economy to work for the planet. We’ll take stock of where we currently stand and where we need to go to bring nature into the economic system.
Meet our panelists:
David Sternlicht - Ethic
Ricardo Bayon - Encourage Capital
David Antonioli - Transition Finance
Mariana Sarmiento - Terrasos
Tim Male - Environmental Policy Innovation Center
Moderator: Genevieve Bennett - Forest Trends
Meet the co-hosts:
Forest Trends: Forest Trends' mission is to drive innovation in environmental finance to sustain resilient ecosystems and communities. For over two decades, Forest Trends has pioneered the idea that creating economic value in our forests and natural ecosystems is one of the most powerful incentives for sustaining them. We work at the level of the whole system: creating knowledge, increasing capacity, building unusual coalitions, facilitating investment, and fostering innovation. Our Ecosystem Marketplace initiative is the leading not-for-profit global source of information on environmental finance, markets, and payments for ecosystem services.
Encourage Capital: Encourage Capital is an investment firm that seeks to change the way investment capital is used to solve critical environmental and social problems. It does this by building a community of investors, foundations, market-leading companies and non-profits to deploy private capital into systemic solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Encourage believes that, done right, investing can generate both compelling investment returns and meaningful social and environmental impacts.
Ethic: Ethic has spent the last eight years simplifying the complex world of personalized, sustainable, and impact investing. We partner with hundreds of advisory firms to help wealth advisors and investors create portfolios that align personal values with financial goals. We are on a mission to harness technology, data, and storytelling to redefine value and empower our clients to invest in the future they want to build.