In a Curation Collective event last month, our guest speaker Peter Davies, managing partner and head of developed markets strategy at Lansdowne Partners, argued biodiversity, otherwise termed "natural capital", is likely to become an investable social asset class. He explained that biodiversity's value is subjective "like art", which makes it harder to quantify, standardise and index, yet still meaningful economically. He pointed to emerging businesses combining economics and technology to generate natural capital commercially and build a credible track record of returns, while stressing outcomes remain highly dependent on regulation and the wider policy climate. (Curation Collective event – 28 April 2026)

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Valuing nature – The natural world provides countless services for humanity and is essential to our economy. In a previous blog, we covered the UK National Emergency Briefing of November 2025 which highlighted that the UK has one of the lowest biodiversity rates in the world, largely due to agriculture and pesticide use. Biodiversity has been formally acknowledged as critical to UK national security. The financial system, however, is still trying to catch up with how to measure and put a value on nature to reflect its importance.

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Biodiversity and carbon sequestration – Nature is very effective at regulating itself and sequestering carbon. For example, the ocean generates 50% of the world's oxygen and absorbs 30% of CO2 emissions. Phytoplankton alone capture 40% of atmospheric CO2 and convert it into oxygen – four times more than the Amazon rainforest. Ocean and marine environments are degrading fast, with failing services predicted to cost the global economy around $8.4tn over the next 15 years. Whales are a key corner stone to the health of phytoplankton, yet six out of 13 species are endangered. If we assigned monetary value to a whale’s services, would we view them differently?

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The value of a whale – In 2019, financial economist Ralph Chami and his colleagues conducted research for the International Monetary Fund which found the carbon sequestration services over a single great whale's lifetime are worth more than $2m in dividends. Whale faeces excrete nutrients essential for phytoplankton populations to thrive. Where there are whales there is more phytoplankton and therefore more carbon conversion. Additionally, when a whale dies naturally, 33 mt of CO2 stored in the body sink to the sea floor to be locked away for hundreds to thousands of years.

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Monetising the problem – An estimated 20,000 whales are killed from ship strikes each year and many more die through entanglement in fishing gear. Using Chami’s calculation, through shipping strikes alone the world is losing $40bn worth of carbon sequestration services annually. As companies pay to develop uncertain carbon sequestering technologies to meet their emissions targets, they could instead protect whales and know for certain carbon is not only being captured but converted into oxygen through their services. Furthermore, if whale protections led to a phytoplankton increase of just 1%, the CO2 captured would be equivalent to the sudden appearance of two billion mature trees. This demonstrates the value of protecting nature.

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A living economy – As the current oil embargo and closure of the Strait of Hormuz push leaders to open new drilling fields, knowing the decision could force a whale species to extinction, current political priorities and our dependency on oil become clear. Capitalism is very good at hyper-focusing on value for immediate human use, but not for the economic health of the future. Crude oil is itself the remains of living marine organisms compressed over millennia. Our economies and politics are dictated by marine life when dead, but rarely when alive. Chami’s work demonstrates how monetising the services of nature can in turn protect its implicit value and can guide philosophising the monetary value of nature and its services.

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Investing in nature – Through carbon markets, carbon credits can already be bought to offset emissions by funding projects that reduce, avoid or remove carbon, including nature-based sequestration solutions. Now, new nature-finance markets are emerging that go beyond a carbon focus. Biodiversity-linked bonds, outcome bonds and debt-for-nature swaps are financial mechanisms designed to mobilise capital for nature protection, often by linking financial terms or investor returns to measurable conservation outcomes. In 2025, labelled sustainable bonds had reached around $6.2tn and the market is expected to mature.

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Looking forward – However, clearer policy frameworks, stronger baselines and better measurement standards are needed before nature finance can scale meaningfully and non-discriminatorily. There is currently a biodiversity finance gap of $700bn annually and governments are essential at bridging the gap through incentives and financial mechanisms which will allow private finance to flow where it is needed. People already value nature – the challenge is giving it a credible price tag in a capitalist system.