When thinking about nature finance at Awe for Nature Foundation, we start with the premise that nature is essential public infrastructure.
Our economies are built on underlying infrastructure enabling everything else to operate. Electricity grids, public transport, road networks, dams, and information networks are all examples. Natural infrastructure plays the same role. Forests regulate water cycles, water catchments supply cities, healthy biodiversity enables agriculture and, hence, our global food supply. Functioning ecosystems are as fundamental to our communities and to economic activity as built infrastructure.
Yet we rarely treat these natural systems as the critical infrastructure that they are, and as a result, we rarely finance them as such.
At Awe Nature, we aim to apply existing approaches to financing public infrastructure for nature. This shifts the conversation away from raising more money for conservation and towards treating nature as the long-term public asset that it is.
But practically demonstrating nature’s role as essential economic infrastructure and financing it appropriately presents two fundamental challenges:
The first is ecological. Before an asset can be managed, its condition has to be understood. We need ways to measure the health of nature and understand how it responds to management interventions over time. Monitoring systems, scientific baselines, and biodiversity credits are all attempts to build that feedback loop.
The second is economic. Infrastructure is financed when the value it creates can be identified. A bridge, for example, connecting two places, reduces travel times and supports economic activity, making its benefits relatively straightforward to estimate. Nature is more difficult. Ecosystems are interconnected; hence, the benefits they provide are shared across landscapes and borders. The relationship between a healthy ecosystem and a particular economic outcome is not always easy to isolate. For example, the value of a forest might appear in water security, agricultural productivity, climate resilience, or all of them at once.
These are the questions we are answering through our pilot projects in the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe. As we test financing models in real landscapes, build monitoring systems, and work with partners across multiple sectors, we are identifying where existing financing models can be applied and where there are gaps requiring innovation.
The long-term success of nature finance may be for it to stop being called nature finance at all and simply become good finance.
