Nature tech – what is it and why is it important for climate and nature?

Nature is a vital resource, necessary for our health, livelihoods, and well-being – it is the physical world in which we live. At present, $44 trillion of economic value generation – more than half of the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

We also need nature to provide more than one third of the mitigation required by 2030 in order to keep our global climate goals in reach. Nature can help us mitigate and adapt to climate change, building resilience in our global ecosystems.

The degradation of this vital resource is happening at an alarming rate: 32% of the world’s forest area has been destroyed; more than 85% of wetlands are gone; 33% of fish stocks are overfished; 50% of coral systems have been destroyed. We are wiping out our habitat.

We are in much need of hope, particularly during COP15 – the two-week summit in Montreal that is the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade during which countries hope to strike a deal on protecting and restoring nature

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are designed to restore, preserve and manage nature while mitigating climate change and facilitating a just transition, and are being implemented all around the world – and do give us that glimmer of much-needed hope.

NbS protect existing ecosystems, help to manage land more efficiently, and restore natural environments. Additionally, nature-based solutions are ensuring that the billion or so people involved with nature on a daily basis, many of them resource-poor, can thrive.

We need more NbS and we need them fast – which is where emerging technologies called ‘nature tech’ come in.

Nature tech encompasses any technology that can be applied to enable, accelerate, and scale-up nature-based solutions – which require significant new levels of investment if we are to reach our climate, biodiversity and land degradation goals.

Nature tech can be divided into four broad categories:

According to a new report issued this month by UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and partners, international climate goals will be out of reach unless investments into nature-based solutions quickly ramp up to $384 billion per year by 2025, more than double of the current $154 billion per year. This is where nature tech could play a valuable role.

“Capital moves to nature at the speed of trust”. This quote from Manual Pinuela, Co-founder of Cultivo, describes the emerging new market of nature tech that is critical for creating the trust required to adequately fund NbS. Through focusing technology on nature, we can measure and quantify improvements, in many cases for the very first time.

At the moment, commercial implementations of nature-based solutions – necessary for sustained funding and deployment – in many cases still don’t have a well-defined path to monetization. Non-profits, while they serve an important catalytic function, simply don’t have the funds required to fully deploy NbS.

In addition, NbS approaches differ – sometimes radically – from business-as-usual practices across the entire value chain. Users, suppliers, off-takers and funders need to rethink how they do business. These kinds of changes are never easy.

The new The Nature Tech Market. Necessary, Emergent, Dynamic report by Nature4Climate and Capital for Climate provides information and clarity around the nascent nature tech sector that can help build trust in the role that NbS have in restoring balance to the climate and the natural world.

It introduces a taxonomy that will help investors and users of nature tech – distinct from climate tech and agritech – to identify it and describe it consistently.

The report also estimates that the current nature tech market size is approximately $2 billion and is estimated to grow to $6 billion in less than 10 years.

The report finds four trends for market growth over the next five to 10 years:

As attention turns to much-needed government action in Montreal this month, it is clear that we need private sector investment to scale up nature-based solutions.

And while emerging tech solutions are by no means a silver bullet, they can make NbS more efficient, their benefits more verifiable, and can be used to ensure that they provide for a just transition.

Nature tech is essential for helping NbS address the interrelated challenges of climate change and nature loss, as well as supporting global climate, nature and sustainability goals.