As Chair of the G7 Impact Investing Taskforce, Nick Hurd has called for a change of mindset “to mobilise trillions of dollars into investments that combine return with positive social or environmental impact.”
Here, he explains the place of high-integrity nature-based solutions in a fundamental rethink what we finance, and how.
In this pivotal decade, we have got to start valuing nature, and investing in it at a scale we have never done before.
This is becoming increasingly clear to the politicians. We’ve just come from a G7 summit where nature was prominent, and we’re days away from COP26, where it will be centre stage.
Why? Because it’s increasingly clear that we don’t have a solution to the climate crisis without significant investment in nature-based solutions. They are critical to mitigation – they could be as much as 30% of the solution – and to the adaptation we are going to need, now we are locked in to some degree of climate instability.
Politicians get this. It now requires governments and investors to work together smartly. They need to break down the barriers to investment, and create the environment in which institutional investors and corporate investors can invest with confidence in offsetting residual emissions through high-integrity, nature-based solutions. And opportunities to invest in nature-positive activities and enterprises, to support what has got to be a colossal effort to conserve and regenerate our natural systems.
That’s the challenge for us: we’ve got to be net zero and nature positive. I hope we can all find ways of working together to meet that challenge of valuing and investing in the natural systems on which our economy and we all ultimately depend.
Nick Hurd served as a minister in the UK Government, where his responsibilities ranged from civil society and social investment, to international development, to climate change. He is now a senior advisor at SYSTEMIQ and Chair of the G7 Impact Investing Taskforce.
