Episode 41: Bioabundance

Ben Goldsmith is an environmentalist, financier, and advocate for rewilding who has spent decades at the intersection of conservation and investment. In this episode he shares his unique perspective on how finance can support ecological renewal, how rewilding is revolutionising conservation, and how investors can tap into nature recovery as an emerging asset class.

Useful Links:

Follow Ben on LinkedIn here

Listen to his podcast Rewilding the World here

Read Ben’s book recommendation: Feral by George Monbiot

Click here for the episode web page. This episode is also available on YouTube.

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This podcast is brought to you by Re:Co, a tech-powered advisory company helping private market investors pursue sustainability objectives and value creation in tandem. 

Produced by Chris Attaway

Artwork by Harriet Richardson

Music by Cody Martin

Transcript

FIS - Episode 41: Bio Abundance with Ben Goldsmith 

[00:00:00] BEN: It would've blown my mind if you told me 10, 15 years ago when I was busy investing in renewables and water and waste. One day we will be able to get investors to invest in Rewilding. The thing, the thing of your childhood fantasy. It would've blown my mind. Well, it's happening.

[00:00:24] JENN: Welcome to the Future and Sound podcast. I am your host, Jen Wilson. This is a podcast where we discuss people, planet, and profit. In each episode, we'll learn from world-leading experts who can help us see the future we want and our role in it.

[00:00:50] JENN: This is episode 41, bio Abundance.

[00:00:59] JENN: The reason why I asked Ben Goldsmith to come onto this podcast is because I really wanted to bring in a conservation lens to this podcast, which is helping, uh, finance leaders to incorporate sustainability into what they do day to day, and I really couldn't think of anybody better than Ben to join us.

[00:01:19] JENN: He's been at the forefront of many conversations in Britain and globally on Rewilding, and he's been involved in sustainable investing for decades. And with that, and, and surely I will be asking him many questions about, uh, his background and how he came to be doing what he's doing. But with that background, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity.

[00:01:44] JENN: To bring him into the Future and Sound podcast. So, Ben, welcome. I'm delighted to have you. 

[00:01:48] BEN: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Jen.

[00:01:54] JENN: So to begin with, I, I, you've worn many hats, uh, in finance, uh, looking at the environment, uh, supporting nonprofits and foundations. Could you give us a brief overview of your journey and how these threads connect in your life's work? 

[00:02:11] BEN: I guess it feels to me like I've had two hats in the sense that, um, I grew up from a very early age with a, with an intense fascination and love for nature and wildlife.

[00:02:22] BEN: So that has been kind of the overriding theme of my life since my earliest memories, like if you'd come to our home in Richmond, west London, um, in quite a green and wild part of West London, by the way, on the edge of Richmond Park, which is an incredible landscape. Um, you'd have found me in the. Back garden, putting out bird boxes and trying to dig out ponds and looking for stuff, and I would've had a story of something that I'd seen and th this was what I was obsessed with.

[00:02:47] BEN: And Rewilding wasn't a thing in the eighties, that word I don't think had been coined yet. But I was a re wilder. I have a letter tucked in a drawer in a desk in the house that I grew up in where my mom still lives. From the very patient manager of Richmond Park explaining to an 11-year-old me why we couldn't release wild boar into the royal parks.

[00:03:07] BEN: And, um, so I, I wanted to see missing species back in Britain. I wanted to see wild, the landscapes, and I refused to accept this idea that Britain is not a place where you can find wildlife, where you have to get on a plane and go to Africa or India, or even just across to the continent of Europe if you wanna see real wildlife.

[00:03:24] BEN: I thought. You know, why not here? So that's why I've spent a whole chunk of my life working on nature and conservation policy as an activist and a philanthropist, and, and it, it's always been a big part of my life. Um, but, but the other hat is one of, uh, investment. I've been interested in commerce and investment and I wanted to have a kind of grown up career.

[00:03:46] BEN: 20 years ago, it was quite hard to imagine that you could devote yourself fully to nature and conservation. Now, of course, things have changed dramatically and we're gonna talk about that, but, but back then it felt like, you know, you had to get paid and so you had to go work in kind of investment.

[00:04:01] BEN: Banking or finance or something like that, that, that was kind of, my father had been a big financier and, and, and entrepreneur and, and he died when I was 15. And I felt certainly an expectation that I would follow somewhat in his footsteps, but I wanted to do so in a way that was green. Loosely defined.

[00:04:17] BEN: And so I set up a green investment fund in early two thousands. After a couple of years working in a stockbroker, I teamed up with some guys older than me and we set up a venture capital fund investing in what they called at the time, clean tech. Um, and that grew from there. And we built an infrastructure investing business looking at renewables and waste.

[00:04:36] BEN: Treatment and water treatment and this kinda stuff. And, um, and then we added a listed equities business in, in, in a strategy that you'd describe, I suppose, as ESG, environmental, social and governance filters. And, and so I was in green investment, but not necessarily nature investment, so green investment.

[00:04:53] BEN: So I was investing in the, the kind of hard engineered end of decarbonizing. Our human systems. How do, how do we transition to zero carbon electricity generation? How do we move to. Clean water, how do we move to closed loop, uh, use of materials and, and an ending of this kind of linear production of massive amounts of waste.

[00:05:16] BEN: And, but it was all quite conventional stuff, although it didn't feel it at the time. I mean, solar in 2005, six felt like a bit of a pipe dream. It was kind of a rich enthusiast's hobby. My uncle Teddy, who I loved, who was an old greenie. He looked like an Old Testament prophet. He'd been involved with Greenpeace from the start and the green party, and he was kind of adored my brother, my, my, my father, sorry, his younger brother, they were kind of chalk and cheese.

[00:05:40] BEN: Won the industrialist, won the kind of hippie ecologist, but I remember him putting solar panels on his roof and they cost a fortune and they didn't work. And he got ripped off and the grid connection failed. And, and the, the idea that solar could become one of the most mainstream. Infrastructure asset classes the world has ever seen receive a greater wall of capital than any category of infrastructure as.

[00:06:01] BEN: Ever witnessed, uh, would've, would've felt, felt crazy at the time. So, um, so I, um, I kind of wore these two hats. I, I, I was an investor with a suit and tie building green investment, uh, products and strategies in, in, in the world of finance, and I spent every spare moment. Either outdoors in nature or hustling and advocating on behalf of nature in various different ways, including a five year stint on the board of the UK government's environment department, defra, and now I'm, I'm hoping to kind of coalesce those two things and bring my experience in raising and managing capital to bear directly on the nature that I love.

[00:06:39] JENN: That's really exciting. And just one of the things that really strikes me about your story, Ben, is that. Many people didn't really get into sustainability and investing until 2019. 2020. So you were 20 years in advance of that. What was it like starting a sustainability themed investment firm in 2002 when it wasn't really on the radar and, and how do you see where we are today versus where we were 20 years ago?

[00:07:07] BEN: So I was really young. I mean, it was, it was actually 2004 I, I guess I was 22 at the time, and whilst I work, was working with some guys who had much more experience than me. They were both 25 ish years older than me. One had been at Rothschild, the other had been at Shell. It felt very exciting and very obvious to me that the world was gonna undergo a green industrial.

[00:07:27] BEN: Revolution, like we really believed our own shtick, and we'd sit with investors and tell them, this is what's gonna happen. We're gonna move to a world in which resources are used over and over again with circularity. That, that all power is generated by renewable sources, that all water courses are gonna become swimmable, fishable, drinkable, to quote Richard Nixon.

[00:07:47] BEN: And, and that the technology is here and now to make that happen. And all we need to do is invest in it and we will save the world whilst getting rich now. It didn't work out in the way that I expected that early venture capital fund didn't go very well. Um, the second one that we raised went better and we ended up building a successful business over time, although most of the success was in the more conventional stuff.

[00:08:08] BEN: So in infrastructure, investing in using proven technology at scale and some of the public equity stuff. So investing in North American freight, railroads and semiconductor manufacturers and, and, and waste. Treatment and management businesses and so on. So it, it became more conventional as we went along and maybe a little bit less idealistic, but in parallel with us building that business, the world did indeed undergo a, a, um, a, a green industrial revolution.

[00:08:35] BEN: It's kind of happened in fits and starts, but I think Michael Lebr was the person who coined the idea of a sneeze theory in that things happen very slowly and then suddenly like a sneeze. So if you look at solar, for example, it rolled out. Slowly in a way, and then suddenly bam, look at what's happening this year.

[00:08:53] BEN: Last year, the whole world is going solar. The same is happening in electrification of transport. So our predictions proved right. Um, but we felt very ahead of our time and um, I think probably my enthusiasm wasn't matched by the kind of success that we expected. 

[00:09:10] JENN: As you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, the two hats that you wear, and I'm just interested, my question is sort of drawing on both.

[00:09:18] JENN: How do you think mainstream finance should evolve to better support biodiversity? And, you know, what does that mean for some of the rewilding work, uh, that you've been, uh, focused on over the past years? 

[00:09:29] BEN: So, co conservation has been turned on its head, it's been revolutionized in the last, say, eight or 10 years.

[00:09:36] BEN: The historically conservation was about saving the very last habitats and wild places. By micromanaging and, um, and, and aiming for very clear outcomes. So in Britain, for example, a species like the bitten is on the brink of extinction. It's, it's a bird that requires reedy wetland habitats with very specific needs.

[00:09:59] BEN: And so charities like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the, the UK's largest nature charity, would then acquire. Pockets of land on which exactly the right conditions could be created through micromanagement in order to increase the number of bittons. And that has been very, very important during the last half century because a whole range of niche habitats and species would simply have disappeared into extinction if we hadn't had, um, that those conservation efforts.

[00:10:26] BEN: Um, I think what's happened is people have understood that you can restore nature. In a much less predictable way, at much greater scale and more cost effectively by simply restoring natural processes. And this is what Rewilding is about, and it's not micromanaged. It's not. Conservation 1.0. This is conservation 2.0, it self-willed, unpredictable, messy nature recovery.

[00:10:50] BEN: And while a rising tide lifts almost all ships, there will be some losers. And we dunno what those will be. And, and, and this is Rewilding. Um, so I, I think a really exciting thing is happening in, in. Nature recovery, where we've gone from hands-on, small scale, highly targeted conservation, which is expensive and vital.

[00:11:11] BEN: Played a very important role to a new model of Rewilding where we're trying to restore large scale habitats and to connect them up with each other. Now, a famous report, the Lorton report in Britain, came up with the following strap line. If we're to restore nature in Britain, we need it to be bigger, better, and more joined up, and Rewilding is the key to that.

[00:11:31] BEN: But where's the money? And that's what I think is interesting is now finally we have the possibility to tap up private investors, insurance companies, pension funds, wealthy families, and persuade them to invest in this idea of rewilding landscapes and seascapes at scale in the expectation of securing a financial return from doing that.

[00:11:50] BEN: And if you would've blown my mind, if you told me 10, 15 years ago when I was busy investing in renewables and water and waste, one day, we will be able to get investors to invest in rewilding The thing. The thing of your childhood fantasy, um, I would've, I would've blown my mind. Well, it's happening.

[00:12:09] JENN: Hey, it's Jen. I just wanted to take a quick moment to let you know a bit about Ricoh and what we do. We're a tech enabled advisory firm that helps private market investors and companies measure sustainability metrics using our software platform. We. Also help you to set targets and focus your efforts on sustainability areas that really matter for your business.

[00:12:31] JENN: And finally, we help clients to translate all of this work into your core value creation strategy or your business model. Check us out@re.co.com to get in touch. All right, now back to our conversation. Two questions for you. One, I just remember being, um, in the Lake District many years ago, what was it, 15 years ago, doing a master's that brought me to the uk.

[00:12:58] JENN: And we were just talking about the landscape and what are we, what are we conserving to basically are, you know, the vi is it pre Viking? Is it, you know, what is the, what is the standard? Where do we, where do we want to get to? Because of course, humans have been interfering, uh, with the landscape for a long time here in the United Kingdom.

[00:13:19] JENN: So that's sort of one question in the next is I'd love to get an example of how. Pension funds, um, investors can get involved, um, in Rewilding. Um, we at Ricoh do quite a bit of work, um, with private equity funds, infrastructure funds and helping them to embed sustainability into their investment approach.

[00:13:40] JENN: So it'd be really interesting to better understand this new dimension. Um, but let's start with how do we decide. What we are aiming for. Um, cons, conservation 2.0, you know, what is, what is the, where do you want to get to, I guess this, uh, points to who are we reintroducing? You know, what, what does, what does good look like in that regard?

[00:14:04] BEN: I often get asked this, like, you know, are you waiting for something in particular? Like what, what, what do you have? What's the end game? Um, 'cause obviously when you plant trees, con conservation 1.0, you plant a bunch of trees and then you think in 20 years time I'll have a forest and you sit and wait.

[00:14:19] BEN: Well, I've come to the view that nature is really a process rather than a static thing. And it's about restoring the healthy flowing of that process. So restoring those species interactions, restoring the missing pieces of that piece of clockwork, and then, and then witnessing how it plays out with any particular, without any particular expectation in mind.

[00:14:42] BEN: Um. So the re rewilding is a controversial term, and I think what make one of the reasons why it's controversial is the re In other words, we're going backwards, we're gonna wind the clock back. And of course what was is a kind of inspiration, but I don't think we're winding the clock back. I like to think of it as looking forward and that we are creating something, um, that that works.

[00:15:04] BEN: As nature intended, even if we don't really understand what that is. Um, so we are creating a, a a, an environment in which you get massive biodiversity, but also massive bio abundance. And we've lost touch with this idea of bio abundance. Everyone talks about biodiversity, that which means the number of species in a particular ecosystem, which is obviously very important.

[00:15:23] BEN: But bio abundance is so important. That thing of, I saw a video from someone sent me from, uh, Santa Cruz in, in California of a super part of dolphins, massive numbers of dolphins, and just the abundance, the awesomeness of seeing a huge number of dolphins in the sea, or the skies darkening with migrating birds.

[00:15:42] BEN: There's eyewitness accounts from 300 years ago from Somerset. Where, where I am of the skies, literally darkening with migrating ducks and geese and waterfall them and, and um, and wading birds and so on, that those numbers have collapsed. We, we, we just, the sheer abundance of life where I come from in Britain has been diminished beyond belief.

[00:16:03] BEN: So I think we're aiming for as much biodiversity and bio abundance as can be achieved, but we don't. Know what that will look like until we try it and we effectively allow Na nature to play out as it as was kind of intended. So, I, I, um, I, I don't know that we're aiming for a particular date. The only, the only relevant dates to me perhaps are the dates on which species went extinct.

[00:16:30] BEN: So I like to talk about how beavers have been extinct in Britain for 600 years. So you could say that by restoring beavers, we're winding the clock back 600 years. Um, I think it's interesting for people to know when species disappeared from a landscape, wolves disappeared from Britain, most likely. In the late 18th century.

[00:16:47] BEN: So we're technically winding the clock back a couple of hundred years when we bring wolves back eventually to Britain. So I, I think there's a relevance there, perhaps in helping people to understand what we're putting back. Um, but, but fundamentally, I like to think of Rewilding as a pathway, not just to ecological renewal, but to social and, um.

[00:17:06] BEN: And, uh, uh, economic renewal. So the lake district's a really good example of this. The lake district is grazed to high heaven by sheep. And to give you an idea, there were probably a million to 2 million sheep in all of the British ISEs, including Ireland in 1850. Today, just in Great Britain, there's around 40 million sheep depending on the time of year.

[00:17:30] BEN: So this is a massive expansion in the numbers of sheep, which are not native to the ecosystem. They are the antithesis. Keystone species. These are animals which live in Asia Minor, the kind of dry, dusty hills of kind of Turkey and bring them into the sudden wet hills of England and you get 10% of them dying of exposure every winter.

[00:17:48] BEN: They're not happy out there on the hills, even though in small numbers they've been in Great Britain for probably two or even three millennia. This is not a native creature and they are forensic in their grazing. They eat the little wild flowers, the little scrub the baby trees, and the result is the completely naked landscape that you see in the late district.

[00:18:06] BEN: The Lake District would've been a great mosaic of. Bogs and wetlands and naturally meandering, uh, streams and rivers, and it would've had pockets of scrub and dotted trees, and it would've been like the upland landscapes of East Africa. And think of kind of leiki Kenya. It would've been like a wetter temperate Atlantic version of that grazed by native Longhorn cattle or belted galloways, or perhaps the Scottish highland cattle.

[00:18:33] BEN: Also, people would've turned out their pigs in the autumn to feast on the acorns. Um, during a master year, in particular, in a practice known as Panish, you'd have had wild boar. You'd have had wild herbivores, and it would've been rich beyond our comprehension in nature. And then it was tamed. It was kind of a colonial activity that took place.

[00:18:52] BEN: Now the British were good at this before they tamed and colonized far off lands. They did it. Within Great Britain. So we, we went to landscapes like the Lake District and the uplands of the Pennines and of course then to the highlands of Scotland to Wales, across the water, to Ireland. And they, we enacted clearances, we cleared the trees, we cleared the nature, we cleared the indigenous people from the land, and we created these vast sheep branches.

[00:19:17] BEN: And that's what the Lake District is today. It's a huge. Sheep ranch and the result is a landscape that is unable to host much in the way of wildlife nature and is unable to do such basic things as hold water. So in, in the communities around the late district, you get flash flooding in the winter, the town of KK floods every winter and, and at great expense taxpayers and great unhappiness that the people who live there.

[00:19:39] BEN: And then three months after cleaning out the sediment and the water from their living rooms, they're told there's a hose pipe ban 'cause there's no water. 'cause the hills are simply unable to hold back water in the way that they were intended. And so restoring nature in landscapes like the NA Late district, is a pathway to a whole new economic model for communities that live there.

[00:19:57] BEN: 'cause sheep farming doesn't pay. The average sheep farmer in Great Britain is getting a. Take home income of somewhere around 8,000 pounds. So way, way beneath the minimum wage. It's not a profitable enterprise and the least productive landscapes in Britain, the least productive 25% say of of this island produces less than 1% of the food that we're producing.

[00:20:16] BEN: So it's not a food security thing either. And that's why the average age of farmers in these remote up landscapes creeps higher and higher and is now in the high sixties because the younger generation just don't wanna do it. There's no living in it. They're not making an impact on national food productivity.

[00:20:30] BEN: It's. It's a, it's a failing business model. So if you can introduce such things as payments for natural flood management, for water storage, water purification, pollution, mitigation through the restoration of wetlands and naturally meandering streams and so on, if you can restore the sponge effect of those landscapes, not only does that provide the country with much needed national.

[00:20:52] BEN: Resilience and a kind of nature-based infrastructure around water, but it also provides a whole new income stream for landowners, land managers in those landscapes, and then layer into that na nature-based carbon and, uh, the, the, the, the market, which is becoming very, very big globally. Microsoft have announced publicly that they're gonna.

[00:21:10] BEN: Aim to draw down from the atmosphere all the carbon that they've ever emitted cumulatively since the founding of the company in the 1970s. That involves the purchase each year of an enormous number of tons of nature-based carbon and an 

[00:21:23] JENN: increasing number with their ai Uh, production. With the ai 

[00:21:27] BEN: E.

[00:21:27] BEN: Exactly. And it's not just Microsoft. So this is a huge global market. And then separate to that, there was a market in biodiversity credits. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline have said, we wanna be nature positive, so they will invest in nature recovery in the form of. Biodiversity tokens of some sort or other, and it's, it's an emerging market and we'll see how that plays out.

[00:21:46] BEN: Um, and then you've got this concept of insetting. Let's just say you are growing. Apricots or you are a retailer buying apricots. Well, restoring nature in the vicinity of those apricot farms builds resilience in terms of fresh water, in terms of pollinating insects. You need those insects to fly and then pollinate the apricot flowers.

[00:22:03] BEN: So it's a way of building resilience within your supply chain whilst also, um, uh, contributing to the drawdown of carbon and the restoration of ecosystems. It's kind of the opposite of offsetting is insetting. So you've got, you've got a range of new markets growing up, um, alongside a government funded stewardship scheme.

[00:22:19] BEN: That offer a potential for real new sources of income for communities in these landscapes that have been utterly wrecked by a monoculture of sheep. So that, that's the British experience. But it, it's the same is true everywhere. Often land use is not economically rational, and so it doesn't take much in terms of shifting incentives to create a tipping point and a massive change.

[00:22:39] BEN: And, and just to finish on the late district. Nobody is telling these communities that their way of life must end, that they mustn't farm anymore because these are communities that often go back generations in the same farms, in the same villages. The farmers in these communities are the sole and the backbone of society, and you don't want them to stop farming because they don't wanna stop farming.

[00:22:59] BEN: And it's, it's kind of. It's, it's, it's like what makes England, England to some extent. It's when you go to these landscape in Wales, the last native Welsh speakers are sheep farmers in the valleys. So you, you don't want to drive them from the land, and you can well understand their fears around their way of life, their culture, and their livelihood.

[00:23:16] BEN: But the fact is monocultures of sheep are not working. Will not keep them in the land. So what you're suggesting to them is that they switch to an older way of farming where perhaps food production is not the be all and end all, but more of a byproduct. So switch back to the keystone native species that their ancestors farmed with, which are native cattle.

[00:23:35] BEN: Native pigs in low numbers without supplementary feed, roaming where they want eating what they want, sleeping where they want, using modern technology like no fence or vent collars, which work incredibly well, which are run by run on GPS, and then a whole new set of revenue streams in natural capital. So your farmer is selling a bit of nature-based carbon as part of a community scheme.

[00:23:55] BEN: They're receiving some government stewardship payments under the new Environmental Land Management Scheme. They might be in biodiversity credits one way or another. Uh, they might be paid by the local authority and the Environment Agency for helping to mitigate flooding, and plus they're farming with cattle and pigs and they're producing beef and pork and collecting a bit of wild venison and maybe dabbling in nature tourism.

[00:24:15] BEN: And you can begin to see. How a much more dynamic and vibrant set of income streams can be introduced into communities that have lived off nothing but sheep and and unconditional subsidies for decades now. Those subsidies that the European union's been providing, or in the US you have the farm bill and I'm sure Canada has an equivalent and.

[00:24:34] BEN: They're like an opioid drip that kill innovation. So England is doing something truly groundbreaking by withdrawing those unconditional subsidies and replacing them with a publicly funded stewardship scheme. The only country that's done anything similar is Costa Rica. So I, I think places like the late district are gonna be transformed in a few short years, and my hope and my expectation is that they're transformed by the people that live there.

[00:24:57] BEN: This will be something that they do. It's not something that happens to them. 

[00:25:00] JENN: I have more empowerment and I'm really interested in, you know, so if I'm a private equity executive listening to this, I'm thinking how do I incorporate some of these rewilding principles and, you know, more of a focus on opportunities related to rewilding biodiversity.

[00:25:18] JENN: What are some of the practical steps I can take to incorporate this, uh, into my investment approach? 

[00:25:26] BEN: So I think for, for. Corporations that make stuff that, that sell stuff. I think the opportunity is in aiming to be nature positive. Um, and I think there's, there's kind of two ways of doing that. The first is looking within the business, how can we reduce our impact on nature, both within the business directly and down the supply chain.

[00:25:48] BEN: And there's very interesting technology emerging around how to measure and, and, and manage environmental footprint in that way. And it's becoming a requirement. You've got the task force for nature related financial disclosure, uh, which is developing fast and is likely to become a legal requirement in a bunch of jurisdictions.

[00:26:04] BEN: So corporate executives know that they have to have a handle on what impact their, their business is having on the natural world around, um, and within the business. There are opportunities then to become nature positive through. This insetting idea. So what, what can we do to, to build resilience into our supply chain by restoring nature?

[00:26:23] BEN: And you see a lot of this now in, in vulnerable supply chains around, for example, cacao chocolate coffee, where, where suppliers becoming threatened by an increasingly volatile climate and by, um, increasingly degraded ecosystems in which. Those products are being grown. So if you can go to those places and say, okay, we're gonna restore forest around where the coffee's coming from.

[00:26:44] BEN: We're gonna make sure that the coffee is grown within the trees. We're gonna make sure that local communities are well set and well looked, looked after, and have some price predictability. Then you'll find that in in, in times of volatility and coffee supply, you'd have to worry about it as a business.

[00:26:59] BEN: So there's lots of very exciting stuff happening, particularly in and around food and of companies that are resource heavy. Then, and then the second stage is to look at things like offsets and, um, maybe not even call them offsets. Some, some use the term, some don't. I mean, there's con, there's some controversy around the idea that you can offset your impact and, and I buy that.

[00:27:18] BEN: But I think if a company's doing everything right within their business and their supply chain, why shouldn't they go and buy offsets and cool them offsets and say, we are nature positive and, and frankly, that's where we're gonna get the money we need. In order to invest in nature recovery at scale. Um, and so there is a growing market in nature-based carbon and, and some of those projects are extraordinary and very, very big.

[00:27:41] BEN: And then also there's just pure biodiversity credits. 'cause some ecosystems don't sequester massive amounts of carbon. Imagine if you're restoring. Um, semi desert Savannahs in Western Arabia or northeastern Africa where you can have incredible wildlife, but realistically you're not gonna sequester massive amounts of carbon Patton.

[00:27:59] BEN: And then there are other ecosystems that are incredibly carbon dense. I mean, the tall grass prairies, for example of Southern Canada have fesco grasses if they're grazed right by bison that go down six meters in, in their roots into the soil. These are grasses that can withstand a 30 year drought, I mean, inconceivable resilience, and they sequester so much carbon.

[00:28:21] BEN: So when, of course, the, the, the farming really started in earnest, in the great plains of North America, you could push a metal rod by hand, 3, 4, 5 meters into this incredibly dense. Dark soil. The darkness, the black in the soil is the carbon. So restoring things like tallgrass, peries of bison, off, off, a massive potential to, to lock in carbon.

[00:28:43] BEN: And you can sell that carbon of course at 20 bucks, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a ton depending on how and where and what's the timing and so on. So I, I think for corporates it's about. A combination of looking within and then looking without. And, and there are huge opportunities to do that. Um, and, and the, and the key word for me is resilience.

[00:29:02] BEN: Nature offers the ultimate resilience. So there is a project in, in the southern part of England right now on the River pli, which is a river that's been, um, fundamentally altered across generations. It's now. Dead straight. In many cases, the banks have been hardened with concrete such that when it rains, it's like a fire hose.

[00:29:20] BEN: And the fire hose floods a whole bunch of assets at the bottom of the river. You know, food Logistics Hub, a superstore, uh, ministry of Defense, airfield, national Health Service Hospital Network Rail, um, a na, national Grid Infrastructure. And when those assets are flooded, they're offline. It's. It's not just about the damage, it's about the days offline, and it's almost uninsurable.

[00:29:41] BEN: And so those asset owners have come together and they've said, why don't we pay like an insurance bond in order to build resilience into this river catchment, which is flooding us every year? And so the amount of money they've agreed to pay on an annual basis. Is enough to offer an institutional investor, in this case the West Yorkshire Pension Fund.

[00:30:00] BEN: Uh, an incentive to put up a large amount of money on day one for regling that river and restoring its natural function and reconnecting it with its floodplains and restoring the bogs and the ponds and the oxbow lakes and so on, such that the river is able to hold back the water and release it slowly through the year.

[00:30:15] BEN: So this has nothing to do with government. This is businesses coming together to build resilience in the face of flooding and also drought through rewilding restoration of nature. So it's a partnership made in heaven, and I think we're gonna see a whole lot more of that. From the perspective of, in this case, the West Yorkshire Pension Fund, an in institutional investor, they were able to invest in the category of natural capital.

[00:30:36] BEN: It could be either a kind of bond or some kind of debt instrument or equity, and they're gonna get repaid along with a healthy financial return from. The income derived from the savings that those businesses are gonna generate through reduced flooding intensity and frequency. So, so I, I think that there's gonna be a growing opportunity for institutional investors to invest capital in large scale restoration projects in the expectation of securing long-term, predictable financial yields with blue chip counterparties, infrastructure, asset owners, the public sector, and so on.

[00:31:08] BEN: So I think we're witnessing. A new asset class emerging before our eyes, and of course it requires a certain amount of regulation in order to make sure it works properly to get these things moving. But that's true of all marketplaces. 

[00:31:21] JENN: It's really interesting. Recently we had Paul Palmen, the former CEO of Unilever on the podcast, and one of the things that he spoke to was when he had his, um.

[00:31:31] JENN: Uh, sustainable Living Plan, uh, released in the early 2010s. He talked about partnerships, um, because if our supply chains are more secure than, you know, business units are more secure. And he talked about how during his tenure and obviously. He could speak, you know, to his tenure and not what's happened sub subsequently, but he talked about how business units that had stronger partnerships with communities and focused on sustainability just were more profitable.

[00:32:02] JENN: So there's also a value creation angle to what you've just voiced over with two really powerful examples. So, thank you Ben. Uh, one of my favorite questions to ask, and we're gonna close on this, is if you had to choose one book that most shaped how you think. What book would that be and why? 

[00:32:22] BEN: I loved a book called Ferreal.

[00:32:24] BEN: A guy called George, George Maio, who's a British writer and, and, and, um, politically kind of in a different place from me, I guess. He's quite a sort of le left wing activist and I'd consider myself a small c conservative and, um, believe in free markets and so on. And, but he and I are a good friends and we share a deep love of nature.

[00:32:45] BEN: And the book that he wrote, ferreal opened my eyes to this, this idea that we can. Aspire to so much more and to so much better when it comes to conservation. I think I was still in the mindset then of small scale restoration and a kind of acceptance in a way that most of our landscapes are gonna be dominated by nature.

[00:33:05] BEN: Less, uh, farming deserts, even those landscapes that are not particularly productive for farming and, and the idea that we can really push the envelope and go big in terms of restoration. I mean, he opened with a kind of crazy chapter on how there used to be elephants and rhinos in Britain. They're in the Interglacial period.

[00:33:23] BEN: They were along a hundred thousand years ago. And I, I, um, and, and of course he's not proposing that they be brought back, but he, he opened my eyes to the idea that we can rewild in a big way. And I'd say that was a turning point in my life reading that book. 

[00:33:35] JENN: Amazing. Ben, thank you so much for joining us on The Future in Sound podcast.

[00:33:39] BEN: Thank you so much for having me on, Jen.

[00:33:48] JENN: The Future and Sound Podcast is written and hosted by Jen Wilson and produced by Chris Attaway. This podcast is brought to you by Ricoh, a tech powered advisory company helping private market investors pursue sustainability objectives and value creation in tandem. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to tell a friend about it, and if you have a moment to rate us in your podcast app, we'd really appreciate it.

[00:34:12] JENN: Until next time, thanks for listening.