Nature as Infrastructure

Deborah Lehr as featured on The Paulson Institute

Financing nature has long been an important topic and conversation. Natural systems—forests, wetlands, mangroves, watersheds, coral reefs—perform vital economic functions that have been historically treated as free. And yet the capital has not followed at the scale required.

By one estimate, nature investments currently run at around US$60–70 billion a year. Around 90 percent of this financing comes from public and philanthropic sources, while the private sector—which manages the overwhelming majority of the world’s investable capital—contributes only 10 percent, mostly through corporate sustainability programs, carbon credits, and supply chain commitments that remain marginal and fragile.