{"componentChunkName":"component---src-gatsby-entities-reflection-tsx","path":"/perspectives/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment-villars-rapporteur-report","result":{"data":{"platform":{"reflection":{"id":"6a3cf4008a980e41b9f2e223","slug":"innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment-villars-rapporteur-report","path":"/perspectives/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment-villars-rapporteur-report","name":"Innovation Pathways: Nature-Positive Investment: Villars Rapporteur Report","name_fr":null,"title":null,"title_fr":null,"pretitle":null,"pretitle_fr":null,"subtitle":null,"subtitle_fr":null,"published":"2026-06-25T09:25:20.93","edited":null,"content":{"plain":"Ideas from the speakers\nThe session opened with the presentation of a WEF UpLink report which identifies 50 investible nature-positive opportunities across 13 sectors (the initial long list was 250). It is framed around scoping, sourcing and scaling. The report was described by one speaker as potentially the best WEF has ever produced on the topic. The 50 opportunities were selected against three criteria: whether they sit within a company’s value chain, whether they positively impact nature drivers beyond climate mitigation, and whether they strengthen business financials. Agriculture, food and forestry, alongside mining, emerged as the sectors with the greatest concentration of opportunity.\nThe central tension that the session sought to address was that the pipeline of nature-positive opportunities exists, yet private capital continues to flow predominantly toward nature-negative activities. Three structural barriers were brought up, such as risk assessment frameworks that fail to account for nature, poor return visibility, and the fundamental difficulty of applying a financial mindset to natural systems. The report proposes five priority actions to close this gap: building institutional “nature fluency,” uncovering opportunities hidden inside existing operations, leveraging data that already exists, fostering innovation, and building coalitions. One speaker traced a major journey of financial institutions from a purely climate-focused lens toward a broader nature lens, which is now implemented within their risk management systems. For example, water was mentioned as increasingly being treated as an investable risk category, which already shows a shift that took years to achieve for climate and must now happen faster for nature. The challenge is that nature is far harder to define and model than carbon, and without robust models, finance hesitates. Education, capacity building and collaboration are the areas that need focus before capital can move at scale.\nAnother speaker sharpened the framing. The missing layer in nature-positive investment is not data — there is already enough to act — but the translation from values to value creation. Investors must be simultaneously rigorous and flexible: rigorous in tracking whether an ecosystem is actually functioning healthily, flexible enough to accept that nature defines its own signals. The deployment gap is real. SMEs developing nature-positive solutions struggle to understand how large corporations operate, which makes it difficult to scale without being embedded into major supply chains.\nOne of the speakers presented an investable nature-positive case study, where it was illustrated how seaweed feedstock can be mapped across three distinct markets using causal systems thinking. The example showed how a single feedstock can unlock multiple revenue streams — animal feed, food ingredients, natural pigments — while at the same time working with Indigenous communities to solve logistics challenges and distribute value more equitably. Built on EBITDA discipline and co-benefits modelling from the outset, it demonstrated that nature-positive ventures can be designed for financial rigour rather than treating it as an afterthought.\nInsights from the audience\nThe second part of the discussion focused on finding ideas and solutions with the audience through a breakout session. A recurring theme during the session was the modelling problem: what cannot be modelled cannot be financed. Participants observed that banks and institutional investors are structurally unable to deploy capital toward opportunities because they lack recognised financial models, even when real-world value is evident. Charitable and foundation capital were suggested as a bridging mechanism, as they are useful for catalytic seed funding that de-risks early-stage ventures and kick-starts scaling in local businesses, but are clearly insufficient at the volume required. Examples were raised of major corporations that identified nature-related risks, particularly around water, and moved collectively to address them, which unlocked investment in the process. The consensus was that technology is rarely the bottleneck; it is the business model that connects the dots, creates scalable impact and makes the return case legible to capital markets.\nThe most candid observation from the group was also the most structural: the problem of nature loss is not yet perceived as sufficiently large by the financial system to force decisive action. Until nature risk is priced into balance sheets with the same seriousness as climate risk, mainstream capital will continue to sit on the sidelines. The path forward lies in financial institutions developing novel frameworks that treat nature as a systemic financial risk, and participants agreed that this shift, even if slow, is already underway.\n","text":"# Ideas from the speakers\n\nThe session opened with the presentation of a WEF UpLink report which identifies 50 investible nature-positive opportunities across 13 sectors (the initial long list was 250). It is framed around scoping, sourcing and scaling. The report was described by one speaker as potentially the best WEF has ever produced on the topic. The 50 opportunities were selected against three criteria: whether they sit within a company’s value chain, whether they positively impact nature drivers beyond climate mitigation, and whether they strengthen business financials. Agriculture, food and forestry, alongside mining, emerged as the sectors with the greatest concentration of opportunity.\n\nThe central tension that the session sought to address was that the pipeline of nature-positive opportunities exists, yet private capital continues to flow predominantly toward nature-negative activities. Three structural barriers were brought up, such as risk assessment frameworks that fail to account for nature, poor return visibility, and the fundamental difficulty of applying a financial mindset to natural systems. The report proposes five priority actions to close this gap: building institutional “nature fluency,” uncovering opportunities hidden inside existing operations, leveraging data that already exists, fostering innovation, and building coalitions. One speaker traced a major journey of financial institutions from a purely climate-focused lens toward a broader nature lens, which is now implemented within their risk management systems. For example, water was mentioned as increasingly being treated as an investable risk category, which already shows a shift that took years to achieve for climate and must now happen faster for nature. The challenge is that nature is far harder to define and model than carbon, and without robust models, finance hesitates. Education, capacity building and collaboration are the areas that need focus before capital can move at scale.\n\nAnother speaker sharpened the framing. The missing layer in nature-positive investment is not data — there is already enough to act — but the translation from values to value creation. Investors must be simultaneously rigorous and flexible: rigorous in tracking whether an ecosystem is actually functioning healthily, flexible enough to accept that nature defines its own signals. The deployment gap is real. SMEs developing nature-positive solutions struggle to understand how large corporations operate, which makes it difficult to scale without being embedded into major supply chains.\n\nOne of the speakers presented an investable nature-positive case study, where it was illustrated how seaweed feedstock can be mapped across three distinct markets using causal systems thinking. The example showed how a single feedstock can unlock multiple revenue streams — animal feed, food ingredients, natural pigments — while at the same time working with Indigenous communities to solve logistics challenges and distribute value more equitably. Built on EBITDA discipline and co-benefits modelling from the outset, it demonstrated that nature-positive ventures can be designed for financial rigour rather than treating it as an afterthought.\n\n# Insights from the audience\n\nThe second part of the discussion focused on finding ideas and solutions with the audience through a breakout session. A recurring theme during the session was the modelling problem: what cannot be modelled cannot be financed. Participants observed that banks and institutional investors are structurally unable to deploy capital toward opportunities because they lack recognised financial models, even when real-world value is evident. Charitable and foundation capital were suggested as a bridging mechanism, as they are useful for catalytic seed funding that de-risks early-stage ventures and kick-starts scaling in local businesses, but are clearly insufficient at the volume required. Examples were raised of major corporations that identified nature-related risks, particularly around water, and moved collectively to address them, which unlocked investment in the process. The consensus was that technology is rarely the bottleneck; it is the business model that connects the dots, creates scalable impact and makes the return case legible to capital markets.\n\nThe most candid observation from the group was also the most structural: the problem of nature loss is not yet perceived as sufficiently large by the financial system to force decisive action. Until nature risk is priced into balance sheets with the same seriousness as climate risk, mainstream capital will continue to sit on the sidelines. The path forward lies in financial institutions developing novel frameworks that treat nature as a systemic financial risk, and participants agreed that this shift, even if slow, is already underway."},"content_fr":{"plain":"","text":""},"openGraph":{"title":null,"description":{"plain":"Ideas from the speakers\nThe session opened with the presentation of a WEF UpLink report which identifies 50 investible nature-positive opportunities across 13 sectors (the initial long list was 250). It is framed around scoping, sourcing and scaling. The report was described by one speaker as potentially the best WEF has ever produced on the topic. The 50 opportunities were selected against three criteria: whether they sit within a company’s value chain, whether they positively impact nature drivers beyond climate mitigation, and whether they strengthen business financials. Agriculture, food and forestry, alongside mining, emerged as the sectors with the greatest concentration of opportunity.\nThe central tension that the session sought to address was that the pipeline of nature-positive opportunities exists, yet private capital continues to flow predominantly toward nature-negative activities. Three structural barriers were brought up, such as risk assessment frameworks that fail to account for nature, poor return visibility, and the fundamental difficulty of applying a financial mindset to natural systems. The report proposes five priority actions to close this gap: building institutional “nature fluency,” uncovering opportunities hidden inside existing operations, leveraging data that already exists, fostering innovation, and building coalitions. One speaker traced a major journey of financial institutions from a purely climate-focused lens toward a broader nature lens, which is now implemented within their risk management systems. For example, water was mentioned as increasingly being treated as an investable risk category, which already shows a shift that took years to achieve for climate and must now happen faster for nature. The challenge is that nature is far harder to define and model than carbon, and without robust models, finance hesitates. Education, capacity building and collaboration are the areas that need focus before capital can move at scale.\nAnother speaker sharpened the framing. The missing layer in nature-positive investment is not data — there is already enough to act — but the translation from values to value creation. Investors must be simultaneously rigorous and flexible: rigorous in tracking whether an ecosystem is actually functioning healthily, flexible enough to accept that nature defines its own signals. The deployment gap is real. SMEs developing nature-positive solutions struggle to understand how large corporations operate, which makes it difficult to scale without being embedded into major supply chains.\nOne of the speakers presented an investable nature-positive case study, where it was illustrated how seaweed feedstock can be mapped across three distinct markets using causal systems thinking. The example showed how a single feedstock can unlock multiple revenue streams — animal feed, food ingredients, natural pigments — while at the same time working with Indigenous communities to solve logistics challenges and distribute value more equitably. Built on EBITDA discipline and co-benefits modelling from the outset, it demonstrated that nature-positive ventures can be designed for financial rigour rather than treating it as an afterthought.\nInsights from the audience\nThe second part of the discussion focused on finding ideas and solutions with the audience through a breakout session. A recurring theme during the session was the modelling problem: what cannot be modelled cannot be financed. Participants observed that banks and institutional investors are structurally unable to deploy capital toward opportunities because they lack recognised financial models, even when real-world value is evident. Charitable and foundation capital were suggested as a bridging mechanism, as they are useful for catalytic seed funding that de-risks early-stage ventures and kick-starts scaling in local businesses, but are clearly insufficient at the volume required. Examples were raised of major corporations that identified nature-related risks, particularly around water, and moved collectively to address them, which unlocked investment in the process. The consensus was that technology is rarely the bottleneck; it is the business model that connects the dots, creates scalable impact and makes the return case legible to capital markets.\nThe most candid observation from the group was also the most structural: the problem of nature loss is not yet perceived as sufficiently large by the financial system to force decisive action. Until nature risk is priced into balance sheets with the same seriousness as climate risk, mainstream capital will continue to sit on the sidelines. The path forward lies in financial institutions developing novel frameworks that treat nature as a systemic financial risk, and participants agreed that this shift, even if slow, is already underway.\n"},"image":{"url2x":null,"thumbnails":{"card":{"url":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_480/v1782377568/villars-institute/banner/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment_image__55158613513_9023e9b59b_o_gxssxc.jpg","url2x":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_960/v1782377568/villars-institute/banner/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment_image__55158613513_9023e9b59b_o_gxssxc.jpg"},"mainBanner":{"url":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_1440/v1782377568/villars-institute/banner/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment_image__55158613513_9023e9b59b_o_gxssxc.jpg","url2x":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_2880/v1782377568/villars-institute/banner/innovation-pathways-nature-positive-investment_image__55158613513_9023e9b59b_o_gxssxc.jpg"}}}},"challenge":{"icon":{"id":"684a2dda2dd10058219bebd6","name":"Nature Positive","component":"NaturePositiveIcon"},"color":{"id":"65d5479fd5bcca2bcbc9db4a","name":"Bottle Green","value":"#4A7D49"},"id":"65d54797d5bcca2bcbc9d99d","name":"Nature Positive","slug":"nature-positive","typeLabel":"Theme","badge":null,"path":"/themes/nature-positive","updated":"2026-02-10T10:54:45.03","__typename":"Platform_Challenge","_schema":{"label":"Theme","pluralLabel":"Themes"},"openGraph":{"id":"openGraph_challenge/nature-positive","title":"Nature Positive","image":{"id":"image_villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions","url":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/v1668989838/villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions.jpg","url2x":null,"thumbnails":{"id":"thumbnails-file_villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions","bubbleMedium":{"id":"thumbnails-bubble-medium-file_villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions","url":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_96/v1668989838/villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions.jpg","url2x":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/c_limit,w_192/v1668989838/villars-institute/banner/theme-nature-based-solutions_image__theme-nature-based-solutions.jpg"}}}},"backgroundImage":{"id":"684a3ee9681a755d2aebd494","image":{"id":"image_villars-institute/image-asset/nature-positive-background_image__nature_positive_y59gga","url":"https://res.cloudinary.com/shapeable/image/upload/v1749696218/villars-institute/image-asset/nature-positive-background_image__nature_positive_y59gga.webp","url2x":null}}},"color":{"id":"65d5479fd5bcca2bcbc9db4a","name":"Bottle Green","value":"#4A7D49"},"typeLabel":"New View","intro":{"plain":"","text":""},"intro_fr":{"plain":"","text":""},"outro":{"text":""},"outro_fr":{"text":""},"videos":[],"imageAssets":[],"organisations":[],"challenges":[{"id":"65d54797d5bcca2bcbc9d99d","name":"Nature Positive","slug":"nature-positive","typeLabel":"Theme","badge":null,"path":"/themes/nature-positive","updated":"2026-02-10T10:54:45.03","__typename":"Platform_Challenge","_schema":{"label":"Theme","pluralLabel":"Themes"},"icon":{"id":"684a2dda2dd10058219bebd6","name":"Nature Positive","component":"NaturePositiveIcon"},"color":{"id":"65d5479fd5bcca2bcbc9db4a","name":"Bottle Green","value":"#4A7D49"},"advertisements":[]}],"authors":[{"id":"65d547fed5bcca2bcbc9eb89","name":"Sofiia Martianova","slug":"sofiia-martianova","role":{"id":"rol_m02v21Sk7a2hKGj7","name":"Fellow"},"isMember":true,"bio":{"id":"65d547fed5bcca2bcbc9eb89_bio","text":"Student at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. 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