Now that I am back home in Portugal, it is sinking in that I moderated the first-ever nature panel at Hello Tomorrow in Paris. It was a huge honour to speak with Laurie Menoud, Nicolas Pade and Axelle Ducos about one of my favourite subjects – nature tech.
To sum up the event, I thought I’d sit down and collect some highlights from our conversation:
We started with the million-dollar question: Why is nature so important? I loved hearing Axelle and Nicholas share their insights on biodiversity and the climate crisis – we need to conserve and restore nature to maintain a liveable planet. But financial flows to nature-based solutions are currently at only one-third (US$200 billion) of the level needed to reach our 2030 climate, biodiversity and land degradation targets.
Laurie explained that with a huge funding gap for nature restoration and conservation, we must grow a nature-positive economy that supports, not destroys, ecosystems. Nature tech helps build the business case for nature by improving transparency and funding for nature-based solutions.
Tech can overcome some of the challenges of implementing and financing nature. It offers the chance to disrupt industries destroying ecosystems while revealing more insightful data about the world’s valuable, biodiverse ecosystems.
As we have seen in recent reports from Nature4Climate and Serena, we are currently witnessing a huge surge of venture capital investment in nature tech. Investments are up 18 percent, from US $1.56bn in 2022, to $1.85bn in 2023.
This investment enthusiasm is pushing nature tech into a category of its own, rather than existing as a subset of climate or green tech. In Laurie’s company, At One Ventures, 25 percent of its companies focus on nature tech and she credits their success to unit economics and scalability.
Even so, nature tech needs greater corporate demand signals – these innovative new tools require backing to scale. Only if companies and investors proactively endorse nature tech can we properly and effectively implement nature-based solutions to tackle biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.
If you would like to discuss moderation for either your in-person or virtual panel, please send me an email with the outline and we can follow up with a meeting.
