Nature conservation needs financing. Here's how we get it.

Nature conservation is a current global priority. Beyond any ethical considerations, diverse wild natural systems provide us with a means for solving human problems like flooding, heatwaves, or air pollution; and, in the longer term, climate change.

Further, we have the tools to achieve conservation. Scientific evidence shows that nature conservation measures tend to work - and advocates like Wadham’s Professor Joe Bull want to see them rolled out more widely globally, turning scattered successes into foundational worldwide impact.

There is at least one major issue to resolve, Joe says: “Finance.”

Scaling nature conservation will take a lot more proactive investment. It also needs existing financial subsidies to be diverted away from negatively impactful activities. Joe explains that to secure both of these (‘financing green’ and ‘greening finance’), we have to step into the financial world, speak its language, and build confidence with the variety of actors in that space that we can scale nature conservation in a way that yields results.

This is exactly what his new project, LEON, sets out to help achieve. LEON stands for Leveraging Earth Observation for Nature Finance. Directing more investment towards nature positive activities is the “Nature Finance” part. But what does Earth Observation mean—and how can it help unlock that investment?

Earth Observation is about gathering information on the planet’s multiple systems; in the case of the LEON project, using satellite imagery (literally, satellites orbiting the Earth with devices trained back on ourselves).

“We can already directly track things like forest cover, water quality, and land use change across vast areas," Joe explains. LEON’s goal is to turn this data into reliable, decision-ready insights on biodiversity specifically, that investors can trust. By showing how nature conservation measures are working, Earth Observation helps build confidence in further expanding nature finance mechanisms.

But taking the Earth Observation satellite data and using it to support nature conservation is far from trivial. Satellites can tell you for example where there is a forest or a wetland, but cannot currently track the ‘health’ of those natural habitats directly, nor tell you much about the state of the wildlife that inhabits them. As Joe explains, “a satellite might give you colours on a map, and it’s our job to find patterns between those colours and the biological markers we’re interested in.” In other words, LEON’s task is not just to gather data, it’s to use all the tools available, including AI, to make sense of it before putting it in the hands of investors.

LEON’s is running six pilot programmes at the intersection of Earth Observation and Nature Finance, focused on topics from emerging nature markets, to sovereign debts, and risks in industrial value chains.

The project recently hit a milestone when around 50 people from across the finance sector came together in a major project workshop at the Ashmolean in Oxford, to agree the technical details for those pilot programmes going forward. Banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and beyond – all came in person, and one of the most interesting takeaways was the enthusiasm they are clearly all taking in these issues, and how serious they have become. Nature Finance is big business.

LEON is funded by the European Space Agency and supported by many other partners. To learn more about the LEON project, visit their website at https://www.leon-naturefinance.org/