Photo by Benjamin Jones via Unsplash.
Key points
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Nature-positive investment must more than double if global climate and biodiversity targets are to be met.
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Climate scientist Tim Lenton’s new report argues that nature can experience positive tipping points and offers a practical framework to help investors and regulators identify high-impact opportunities without getting lost in complexity, while urging better cross-sector collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Experts stress that standards and compliance markets are critical to unlock demand.
Nature-positive investments need to accelerate if global climate commitments to reverse nature loss are to be met in time, a leading climate scientist told Green Central Banking.
Tim Lenton, a climate change professor at the University of Exeter, is best known for his research on climate tipping points – events that cause irreversible change to the Earth’s ecosystem.
Some tipping points can be positive, such as reversals that help restore nature instead of destroying it.
In his latest research, Lenton hopes to help investors and regulators understand the importance of nature and identify where investments could have an outsize impact.
“You don’t have to wrestle with all of the complexity, but here’s the way in which you need to understand complexity that’s going to be empowering,” he says of his latest report published in Nature Sustainability.
Nature as a risk management tool
Nature is becoming an increasingly important part of risk management as regulators, governments and businesses become aware of the potential economic impact of nature loss.
“Transitioning our economy towards a more nature positive future requires more than philanthropy, impact investing or corporate social responsibility: businesses across sectors will transform their operations because it makes good economic sense to do so,” Sebastian Buckup, managing director on nature and climate at the World Economic Forum, wrote in a report on nature investment opportunities.
The United Nations estimates that US$571bn is needed annually in nature-based solutions by 2030 to meet global biodiversity, climate and land restoration targets – equivalent to just 0.5% of global GDP. Only $220bn was spent on nature-based solutions in 2023, indicating investment needs to increase by more than two and a half times.
The investment gap in nature isn’t because there is a lack of money, experts say. Often, it is down to a lack of guidance about what to invest in. Lenton’s paper identifies the ways that leaders, governments, scientists and regulators can come together on these issues.
“If nature can be negatively tipped then it can also (in principle) be positively tipped (back) into a more desirable state,” Lenton writes.
He identifies key areas that can be positively tipped, including ecosystem recovery, social-ecological systems, self-propelling adoption, and consumption behaviour. It’s a framework that he hopes stakeholders can use to self-identify investments.
He’s not the only one to realise the nature investment opportunities need to be clearly identified.
“There’s no shortage of capital… The trouble is that there’s a shortage of bankable nature opportunities, so projects that actually meet investors’ requirements,” Charlie Dixon, nature program director at the Green Finance Institute, told Green Central Banking.
What most nature projects struggle with is having clear sources of revenue and demonstrating that to investors, Dixon said.
In the UK, for example, there are opportunities for investing in areas like carbon credits, biodiversity and resilience, but they are not mature enough for institutional investors, which often have the most money to invest.
The World Economic Forum has identified 50 areas for nature investment across 13 sectors in its report from March, including in farming, mining, fashion, transportation and waste management.
The biggest impact, Dixon has found, is when there is a mandatory requirement for businesses to purchase carbon credits.
Having standards is also needed, such as clear guidelines about what is and is not a nature investment, alongside measures to ensure the money is being invested in biodiversity or reducing emissions. But without clear regulations that make such purchases necessary, there’s little demand, Dixon added.
“If you really want money to flow and you want a stable source of demand, compliance markets are the way to go,” he said.
Tipping nature in the right direction
In his paper, Lenton outlines specific measures that can be used to tip nature in the right direction, such as marine protected areas or groundwater management, that also provide social value. Such actions can trigger positive tipping points, but he warns that it also depends on each case and region.
He also notes the value of education and calls for more knowledge sharing among stakeholders, echoing earlier comments on the need for cross collaboration between sectors.
Many of the most successful instances of positive nature tipping points come from the ground up, rather than being government-led, Lenton told Green Central Banking. It is usually work by activists and scientists which then leads to governments stepping in. For example, recovering kelp forests or reversing eutrophication of shallow lakes in Europe.
Other initiatives need government intervention, he added, such as recovering fish populations in overfished waters.
Lenton’s paper doesn’t answer whether such nature investments are bankable. Instead, he echoes the work of Partha Dasgupta, who previously told Green Central Banking that current economic models do not adequately account for nature.
“There are serious flaws in mainstream economics in totally failing to properly put nature in the valuation system,” said Lenton. “This doesn’t always mean a monetisation of what nature can do for us.”
Instead, it means thinking about the utility function and recognising nature as a life support system, for example, oxygen in the atmosphere. This, Lenton argues, needs to be properly valued in economics.
“Whether we manage to monetise that is a separate issue, but currently we’re failing on properly valuing nature,” he said.
This page was last updated August 27, 2026
Written by
Moriah Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of Green Central Banking and has over a decade of experience writing about banking and finance. She is an award-winning American journalist based in Paris and has written for major international publications, including Reuters, The Guardian, and S&P Global. Having grown up in water-stressed Arizona, she has always had a strong interest in bringing awareness to climate and environmental issues.
