5. Designs for Life: Priority Threat Management and Nature-Based Plans

“You have to be on the ground sitting alongside the stakeholders, and part of that process is talking to nature, and feeling.”

- Eric Smith

“Communication is the most underused resource for conservation - everyone has a biophilic soul and we need to connect them with great stories.”

- Lorenzo de Rosenzweig

SYNOPSIS:

This week we’re asking whether it’s possible to support the lifeworlds of nature with the very same tools that have caused them harm. First we’ll be joined by Lorenzo de Rosenzweig who has headed Latin America’s largest nature conservation trusts for over three decades, and then Eric Smith from the Grantham Neglected Climate Opportunities Fund and Edacious will talk about venture capital investing in nature based solutions.

I’m interested in this topic because in parallel to this podcast I invest capital in projects that regenerate nature through my vehicle Ground Effect. In that work I constantly encounter philosophical and practical tensions – namely that complex natural systems and the trillions of processes that enable life to exist can never be fully translated and priced by markets. Nature’s value is infinite. Numbers and metrics can’t tell us about the touch of rough bark or the flutter of a beetle’s wing against our skin. And because money is fungible, it can often efface all distinctions and trigger the further commodification and abstraction of a living ecology. 

And yet finance can be used beneficially on behalf of nature. We can look at the maturing industry of biodiversity markets which attempt to move beyond single metrics like carbon, or debt for nature swaps, blue bonds, true cost accounting, payments for ecosystem services, and even more radical ideas like DAOs where nature owns itself. I’ve uploaded readings and resources on the Lifeworlds library for those who want to go deeper on these innovations. Perhaps then, the conversation of “finance for nature” is about finding the right balance of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and acknowledging where the role of markets begins and ends in the wider spectrum of systems change.

LISTEN:

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST

GUESTS BIOS:

Lorenzo de Rosenzweig is an engineer and marine biologist by training, who for 25 years headed up the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature (a $170 million endowment Conservation Trust Fund) and was Chairman of the Mesoamerican Reef Fund (a $35 million endowment fund) for more than 17 years. During his tenure in both institutions he led resource mobilization efforts that raised close to US$410 million of both project and endowment funds. He is part of several global conservation finance initiatives, such as the Conservation Finance Alliance Executive Committee, the World Environment Center, The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), the Fund for Communication and Environmental Education, the Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic Conservation and Exploration Fund, and several more.

Now “retired” he has started up a new enterprise, Terra Habitus A.C. — a regional environmental fund for Northern México, focused on private lands conservation, borderlands cooperation, regenerative ranching, riparian/waterbasin regeneration, resource mobilization and strategic communication through environmental journalism.

Lorenzo is also a nature, photographer, a watercolor artist, a scientific illustrator and is working on his first fiction book, a collection of illustrated essays on human nature and biodiversity called “Impossible animals in improbable environments”.

The full episode with Lorenzo can be found here!

Eric Smith has spent his career at the intersection of ecology and economy. He was most recently Director of Neglected Climate Opportunities (NCO), the Grantham Environmental Trust's venture capital vehicle. He led investments in businesses and technology that can remove carbon and GHG at scale. NCO includes more than 45 direct investments in startups across all stages as well as funding of numerous grant-to-commercialization opportunities designed to incubate new firms from academia and non-profits.

Eric was previously with SJF Ventures and worked for BlackRock on climate finance, in addition to providing advisory and audit services to forest carbon and other natural resource management projects. He is a graduate of the dual degree program at Duke University, having received his MBA and Master of Forestry. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Costa Rica, supporting women's banking institutions and building recycling programs on the border of Nicaragua.

He is currently Founder/CEO of Edacious, a company working to differentiate food quality and connect the dots between soil and human health.

The full episode with Eric can be found here!

QUOTES:

Lorenzo de Rosenzweig

• We have to work with our heart and our intelligence to bring things back slowly to how things should be.

• Every morning I am grateful that I have been put by destiny and by work, in this position of being someone that eventually might become a good ancestor.

• Communication is the most underused resource for conservation - everyone has a biophilic soul and we need to connect them with great stories.

Eric Smith

• You have to be on the ground sitting alongside the stakeholders, and part of that process is talking to nature, and feeling.

• That is the crux of systems change — reorienting financial decision-making to be more holistic in the way that it allocates resources.

• I don’t think we use debt enough for many of our regenerative agriculture investments. Debt has a certain structure in terms of the patience around it that allows for very clear expectations and a very clear contract.

• We are extractive from our producers. If you want to get back to improving the land, you have to return wealth back to those producers. They know the land better than anyone. They're the reason we're alive.

LINKS:

REGENERATIVE ECONOMICS

FINANCE FOR NATURE

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE