Reimagining Nature Finance

Finance plays a central role in shaping our world — influencing how we interact with nature, one another, and future generations. How do we move beyond “making nature investable” to a financial system that actually helps nature recover? This project convenes practitioners and scholars to test new designs for effective, equitable and enduring nature finance—and to learn from practice.

We begin from two premises: that today’s challenge is not only a funding gap but a design flaw in how finance values, governs and allocates capital; and that progress requires walking a twin trail—pushing reforms within existing institutions while nurturing emergent models rooted in place, reciprocity and long-term care.

Why this matters now: despite enthusiasm for credits and new instruments, most private flows still favour short-term, extractive activity; market-first approaches often struggle with integrity, measurement and justice, especially where land rights and power asymmetries persist. We therefore test approaches that uncouple how money is raised from how it is spent, expand direct public investment and regulation, and strengthen community-led stewardship, alongside careful, limited use of markets.

At our September 2025 gathering in Wytham Woods we worked together with partners to prototype participatory methods to surface the hidden logics inside current architectures (markets, fiduciary duty, subsidy regimes), and explored alternatives that align with living systems. We drew on insights such as the “nature vs finance” design traits (complex/relational vs reductive/accumulative) and the Doughnut/landscape principles as practical design cues for policy, ownership, governance and flow of funds.

This event was an invitation to go deeper — to question the very design of our economic and financial systems, and to ask what it might take to build something fundamentally different. Not just to mobilise more finance, but to reimagine how it can truly serve the recovery of the living world.

We are looking forward to sharing our radical ideas with you, so please check back in with us as the seeds of our imagination begin to germinate.