Before we build another market, what does nature recovery need from us?
Updated: Oct 7
I was recently sent a reflection on Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. What stayed with me was the observation that conservation continues to invoke his name without fully practising what his ecological understanding demands: recognising that humans belong to a community of soils, waters, plants and animals, rather than standing outside it.
That question reaches well beyond conservation. It challenges how we approach climate, biodiversity, land use and finance.
I am increasingly frustrated by environmental conversations that begin with how to price, trade or monetise something, while the physical conditions we need to protect continue to deteriorate.
We can spend years refining a financial mechanism. But what has changed in the atmosphere? What has changed in the landscape? Has exploitation stopped? Have living systems been given the space and conditions to recover?
Those must be the tests.
A recent dinner with two economists brought this tension into sharp focus. We kept returning to economic growth, but I struggled to bring ecological limits and the consequences of continued extraction into the conversation.
Biodiversity should learn from climate’s mistakes
Climate policy has devoted considerable attention to carbon accounting, credits, offsets and market valuation. Some approaches have reduced emissions. Others have produced claims that substantially exceed the benefits delivered.
Yet the scale of the response remains insufficient. Considerable time and money have gone into developing mechanisms, while the underlying damage continues. Adaptation is necessary, but my concern is that it can become a way of accommodating continuing damage, rather than accompanying the urgent reductions in emissions and ecological destruction that remain essential.
Are the mechanisms we develop changing the activities responsible for the problem sufficiently, or making their continuation easier to accommodate?
My concern is that biodiversity is following the same path.
Before we have adequately established what ecological recovery requires, we are developing ways to package biodiversity into units, assign prices and create transactions. In doing so, we risk missing what the living system actually needs to sustain and recover itself. Recorded gains in biodiversity units may coexist with continuing loss of ecological integrity.
A financial product can be carefully defined and commercially successful while failing to secure the recovery of the ecological system it represents. Funding a measurable intervention does not, by itself, establish that the wider system is recovering.
Are we correcting the underlying problem, or creating another market around it?
Climate and biodiversity are connected through living systems
People increasingly ask how biodiversity and climate can be integrated. Of course they are connected. But their connection exists first in the functioning of the Earth.
It exists through forests, soils, rivers, wetlands and oceans; through water cycles, ecological relationships, disturbance and the capacity of living systems to respond to change.
Aligning carbon and biodiversity accounting does not necessarily protect those relationships. A carbon benefit alone cannot tell us whether an ecosystem’s native composition, ecological function, connectivity or capacity for recovery is being secured.
We need to understand the living system before deciding how a financial mechanism might serve it.
Start with what recovery requires
For me, the starting questions are ecological.
What needs to remain intact? Where must space be secured for recovery? Which pressures must cease? Which processes and relationships need to return? What would demonstrate that recovery is happening?
Then we can ask what law, planning, agriculture, fisheries, business and finance must do to create those conditions.
Money has an essential role. People need resources to protect ecosystems, change damaging practices and support recovery over the long term. But ecological outcomes must govern the use of finance, including where those outcomes require restrictions on profitable activities.
Some places need lasting protection from extraction. Some pressures need to be removed rather than compensated for elsewhere. Some ecological relationships cannot be replaced by a purchased unit.
Nature’s continued existence cannot depend entirely on whether it generates a direct commercial return. The financial challenge is to recognise the wider and indirect value of ecological integrity, and make protecting and recovering it financially viable. Alongside this sits an ethical responsibility: nature has a right to exist beyond its usefulness to us.
Making the recovery gap visible
These questions are why I created The Recovery Gap, Wild Legacy’s music-led audiovisual work translating scientific evidence through an original score and imagery.
Drawing on contrasting landscapes and seascapes, it invites us to consider the relationships between ecological processes and the decisions shaping them, and to imagine what becomes possible when the conditions for recovery are restored.
For people working in finance, policy, business or land use, this is an opportunity to look beyond the boundaries of their own sector and engage with a question that connects our efforts: are we creating the conditions for nature to recover?
The screening opens that conversation. Taking it forward requires sustained, collaborative work.
Wild Legacy has identified candidate landscapes and seascapes where an evidence-led enquiry can take place alongside existing initiatives. Led by me through Wild Legacy, the enquiry will maintain a coherent ecological focus across sites and sectors, drawing on scientific expertise and local knowledge to examine what enables or constrains recovery. Emerging questions and evidence will be brought back for scrutiny, discussion and shared learning.
By connecting evidence, experience and decisions across sectors, this evolving process offers an opportunity to uncover possibilities for recovery that working separately may leave unseen.
At COP17, I am seeking people and organisations willing to engage with this proposition, explore how their work could connect with it, and help build the partnerships needed to take the enquiry forward.
See the work. Explore the question. Help take the enquiry forward.
Are we creating the conditions for nature to recover?
See the film. Bring your perspective. Help shape what comes next.
For screening details see link below.
Huge thanks to Timothy Maryon, Eoghan McDonaugh and Gallifrey Foundation.
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