The twin crises of climate change and ecological collapse are accelerating, threatening the very systems that sustain life. In response, nature finance has moved rapidly into the mainstream. New funds, standards, and markets are emerging at pace to raise more ‘nature-positive’ capital, yet this framing fails to ask the deeper question of why capital has been misallocated in the first place.
As a result, instead of tipping us toward something new, many efforts to raise natural capital frequently reinforce and help justify the very structures we most need to transform. The finance system remains trapped in a dominant design that privileges financial legibility and near-term payback over deeper forms of value. The dominant logics of risk, return, and growth continue to drive ecological breakdown.
Mobilising more capital will never be enough if finance itself is not redefined and reimagined to serve life. At stake is not only how much capital is deployed, but what is valued, who decides, and whose voices are heard.
Dare to dream of a different future
Designing for Life: Reimagining Nature Finance explores how finance might be designed differently, drawing on the deep design traits of nature itself. It seeks to identify both where we can push the boundaries of innovation from within the existing extractive system, and where we can cultivate new innovation that systematically transforms the finance system based on the design traits of nature.
The essay proposes a compass to guide practitioners to imagine and cultivate the emergence of a new system through six potential archetypes, based on real life experimentation. These include, for example, models of indigenous-led sovereign finance and also the use of technology to enable commons-based financing mechanisms.
These models are early proof of practice, suggesting that finance can be redesigned to be anchored in place, give legitimacy to those who steward the land, and understand value not only in monetary terms, but in terms of care, continuity, and belonging.
Finance is ultimately a story of what we value, how we grow, and who decides. That story can change — indeed, it must. The invitation is to begin again, not by asking how to fit nature into finance, but how to build finance that belongs to the living world.
The publication has been led by the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance Reimagining Nature Finance Fellow, Justin Adams, with the support of Ostara, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, and the University of Oxford.
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