imagine you walked into a store filled your cart and then left without pay that's what we've done with nature for centuries ecosystems have provided us with clean air healthy soils and fresh water for free but now the invoice has arrived the question is who will pay the bill I've dedicated my life to protecting the environment and supporting the amazing people who stewarded our planet's most valuable resources from my childhood in Canada growing up surrounded by forests and lakes to my PhD in my career directing programs on sustainable agriculture water and resilience across more than 50
countries from the Amazon to the Sahel I've seen firsthand the wonders of nature but I've also seen the fragility of ecosystems when they're mismanaged when our son was born we wanted to instill the same deep Connection in nature in him but he quickly noticed what many of us forget or choose to ignore we only seem to Value nature when it's dead we value trees when they're cut or fish when they're on a plate not when they're swimming freely this disconnect our failure to Value ecosystems when they're alive and healthy is costing us dearly right now
1 million species are at risk of Extinction up to 75% of the earth's land area is substantially degraded and the emissions from 53% of our fossil fuel use and land use change are soaked up by Nature indeed it's our ocean trees and ecosystems that are critical to keeping us with imp plant planetary boundaries our forests are shrinking our ocean is warming our coral reefs are dying and our pollinators are disappearing if we continue on this path we'll face devastating consequences by 2030 biodiversity loss is estimated to cost the global economy $2.7 trillion annually that's in
a short 5 years time the climate crisis itself is a symptom of this deeper problem our failure to properly value nature saving nature isn't just about saving cute pandas it's about saving ourselves but there's an enormous Gap in biodiversity protection estimated at $711 billion per year ecosystems are complex much more than the sum of their parts a teaspoon of soil from the Amazon contains more microbes than there are people on the planet trees are connected by underground fungal networks known as the wood Wide Web that allows them to communicate to share nutrients and warn each
other of threats we need to stop forcing people to choose between cutting down a tree for income or saving it and going hungry the solution lies in more than pricing nature it lies in incentivizing communities indigenous groups and landlords to protect ecosystems and giving them Fair rewards for their efforts this means creating trusted markets that reward preservation over exploitation to get to these markets we need to leverage technology and shift our approach let's start with the tech ADV advances in technology are revolutionizing our ability to monitor ecosystem Health in real time tools like Ai lidar
and bioacoustics can measure species density and Forest Health AI powered satellites can measure Forest carbon and detect deforestation from miles above environmental DNA sampling can detect an endangered species from a single sample and blockchain Technology can enable transparent tamperproof and traceable Assets in payments by combining technology with local knowledge we can create trustworthy markets that distribute funds directly to people on the ground for example smart contracts can put money into digital wallets accessible by indigenous and Community groups and now on to markets let's be honest our efforts to date with environmental markets haven't been great
the voluntary carbon market for example has been fraught with greenwashing and even fraud it's often about credits and debits and trading not maintaining value but just because the first version of our markets hasn't worked perfectly doesn't remove the need to find a way for businesses and consumers to pay for nature Services there is a solution what if we could take these advances and technology and match them up with Nature's needs what if we could create a trustworthy service that customers and companies were happy to pay for what if we looked at something more holistic than
just Carbon Let's call this solution a biodiversity resilience asset and let's focus on that word asset just for a moment something that holds value and maintains value for its owner so how do we get to these assets first you use trusted third-party data providers to collect groundup data you look at soil Health like nitrogen phosphorus you look at biodiversity Health you use environmental DNA use camera traps and you take that groundup data and you pair it with space down data the latest in remote sensing then you bring this dat data together as an asset this
asset represents the ecosystem Services of the land its water its climate regulation its biodiversity health and the resilience building of the people who are protecting it what are their needs linked to the sustainable development goals resilience is about allowing those people people and supporting them to thrive under uncertainty and every asset is also a ton of carbon because nature is amazing at sequestering Carbon and you put all this data and put it in tamperproof technology that allows it to become traceable and transparent and then imagine if this asset was sold to corporates corporate leaders on
Net Zero and nature positive transitions but only on a performance delivered basis so they only paid for the verifiable ecosystem Services linked to that piece of land and then instead of taking the money and running away with it imagine if we delivered a minimum of 75% of the funds down to the ground what if we increase that to 90% this would a provide Assurance for the purchasers and allow them to recognize nature as an essential infrastructure to their business's long-term success a really cool feature of this asset is that we can fractionalize it so we
can take a small piece of it maybe 100th of an asset or a thousandth of an asset and put it in a pair of shoes or put it onto a cup of coffee and put it onto a new bank account account and consumers could traceably verifiably see how their purchase is protecting a few square cenm of land in the Amazon and those ecosystem services and the resilience building of those people or supporting a regenerative egg farmer we need to stop our green wishing we need to build a market based on trust and performance we have
the tools and Technology to act as the cashier for the planet these assets can be the invoice these assets are working right now like in sustainable cacao programs people don't want to cut down trees and do illegal cattle ranching just to scrape by they want to be fairly rewarded for their sustainable practices and consumers want trust and assurity that their payments are making a difference through this solution companies unlock new value and secure their future farmers and communities are empowered through sustainable practices and each purchase becomes a powerful Act of support for the planet a
win for companies a win for Nature's Guardians and a win for consumers who want a better world what happens if we succeed companies consumers and workers become more resilient healthy for forests and wetlands protect us and prevent billions of dollars in damage from floods and droughts communities and Indigenous groups are fairly rewarded for the protection of these valuable resources and these resources Thrive we have to shift our thinking our wealth doesn't come from living on the planet it comes from living from it the wood in the chairs the batteries in our phones the food we
eat our medicine why is your business successful it's because nature provides $44 trillion worth of ecosystem Services annually for free there is ample evidence that people care about nature we need responsible corporate citizens who confidently Champion nature regardless of political or regulatory pressures the invoice for our use of nature is here the question is no longer if we will pay it's how we will pay do we wait for ecosystems to collapse and we all pay a devastating price or do we proactively invest in the solutions we have now the invoice for Nature has arrived let's
pay it before we can't afford to thank you [Music]
