Post date 9 Mar 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,361 words
A Trick of the Tail, Genesis, 1976
A recent New Scientist piece asks an important question: if putting a price tag on nature failed, can more radical tactics save it? My gut instinct is that this gets one half of the story right, and the other half badly wrong.
What it gets right is power. The destruction of ecosystems is not usually the result of decision-makers lacking a spreadsheet. It is the result of ownership, incentives, politics and institutional power being arranged in ways that make destruction and extraction profitable, immediate and concentrated, while the benefits of keeping ecosystems intact are diffuse, delayed and often captured by people with less influence. On that point, perhaps the ecosystem-services tradition was indeed often too optimistic. It assumed that if we could just show the numbers clearly enough, rational elites would do the sensible thing. Sadly, often they did not.
But it does not follow that valuation itself was the mistake. The deeper failure was that nature finance and mainstream conservation often tried to value ecosystems using simplified, visible, above-ground proxies for performance. We counted hectares, stems, tonnes of carbon, species richness, habitat units and recreational value. All useful, up to a point. But ecosystems are not just inventories of visible things. They are layered systems of interaction. Much of what determines whether they function, persist and recover happens out of sight.
Which brings us to fungi, which I want to use as an example.
If mycorrhizal fungi materially shape nutrient exchange, plant establishment, drought tolerance, soil carbon dynamics and ecosystem resilience, then their absence from restoration underwriting is not a minor oversight; rather, it is a category error. Recent research suggests global hotspots of mycorrhizal fungal richness are poorly protected, with less than 10% of predicted hotspots currently within protected areas. SPUN has been pushing this point hard, but it is not just advocacy. There is now a serious scientific case that fungal communities are foundational to ecosystem performance and are being systematically overlooked.
That matters because a great deal of restoration finance still behaves as though the visible layer is the decisive one.
Plant the trees, count the stems, model future carbon, report biodiversity uplift, and assume the below-ground biology will take care of itself. Too often the same with charismatic species. Sometimes it may, but sometimes it clearly will not.
This is where the fungal literature becomes extremely useful, because it moves the conversation beyond metaphor. The strongest version of the argument is not that forests are mystical cooperative superorganisms or that the so-called ‘wood wide web’ overturns economics. It is that restoration outcomes depend on the whole ecosystem and at least in part on fungal condition, and that finance rarely asks enough about it. The underlying review behind the widely shared Conversation article on fungi and tree planting makes exactly this point in a UK context. It argues that fungi are routinely neglected in tree-planting policy and practice even though they influence carbon and nutrient cycling, tree health, disease dynamics, site suitability and long-term woodland performance. The practical implications are obvious. Protect mature woodlands as fungal reservoirs. Be careful about species-site matching. Treat soil biology as part of project design, not a postscript.
That is why I think the New Scientist critique of nature finance framing needs tightening.
Pricing nature did not fail because economics has nothing useful to say about biodiversity. It failed where it mistook partial proxies for ecosystem function, and where it assumed that evidence alone could overcome political economy. Those are different failures. The first is a measurement problem, and the second is a power problem. Both matter, but neither implies we should give up on valuation.
In fact, fungi show why better valuation is still necessary. Humans have a strong bias toward valuing what they can see. Finance has an even stronger bias toward valuing what it can standardise. Above-ground biomass is legible, whereas fungal symbiosis is not. Species counts are tractable, whereas interaction architecture is not. A newly planted woodland is visible in a drone shot, but a degraded below-ground network surrounding it that may undermine long-run resilience is not. And so we end up with investment logic that overweights form and underweights function.
My growing experience tells me that this matters enormously in restoration. Two projects can look identical in a slide deck. Same location type, the same hectares, the same tree species mix, the same projected carbon curve, and the same biodiversity headline. But if one sits within an intact mycorrhizal landscape and the other is trying to regenerate from a compacted, nutrient-skewed, biologically depleted substrate, they do not carry the same risk profile. Above-ground similarity can conceal below-ground asymmetry. That, to me, is the real fungal-finance question. Not ‘can we invent a fungal credit?’ and not ‘can we monetise every hidden process in the biosphere?’. But rather: are we underwriting restoration portfolios with an incomplete theory of ecological performance? Unfortunately I suspect the answer is yes.
And the point extends beyond forests. One of the more interesting recent turns in fungal science is the growing attention to marine fungi. These organisms have long been comparatively neglected, yet emerging research suggests they may play meaningful roles in ocean nutrient cycling and carbon processes. Even if the marine picture is still developing, it reinforces the broader point. Ecological systems often depend on hidden functional layers that become visible to finance only after damage or instability has already surfaced.
This is why I would resist the temptation to oppose ’valuation’ and ‘justice’ as though they sit on different sides of the argument. The New Scientist piece is right that biodiversity politics needs a firmer account of power, alliance-building and distribution. In many cases, the question is not simply whether an ecosystem is socially valuable, but who benefits from its destruction, who bears the losses, and who has the power to decide. That is real. But better politics does not remove the need for better ecological AND financial models. It makes them more urgent. Because if conservation wants to confront power seriously, it still has to say something credible about what is being destroyed, how system performance is impaired, where risks accumulate, and why current investment logic is mispricing reality.
That is where my fungi example matters. They are not interesting because they are mysterious. Rather they are interesting because they reveal just how much of nature finance still works with a surface-level map. Fungi challenge the habit of assuming that what is hard to see is safe to ignore. They push us away from a thin accounting of nature toward a more serious view of ecosystems as living infrastructure. So, acknowledging my bias, no, I do not think the lesson is that pricing nature failed. I think the lesson is that pricing visible fragments of nature while ignoring the operating system was always going to fail. And the answer is not to abandon valuation. Nor is it to reduce all ecology to tradable units. The answer is to build a better bridge between ecological function, power and finance.
For now, that probably means treating fungi first as a diligence and risk issue, not a monetisation gimmick. Ask whether restoration success depends on re-establishing mycorrhizal relationships, ask what past land use has done to soil biology, ask whether there are intact inoculum sources nearby, ask whether fungal recovery is being measured at all, and ask whether the project’s resilience claims rest on biological processes that the investment memo simply assumes into existence. Those are not exotic scientific questions, they are underwriting questions.
And they might be one of the clearest signs yet that nature finance only becomes credible when it learns to price function, not just form. We haven’t missed a trick after all!
References Baird, A. et al. 2022. ‘Can’t see the forest for the trees: the importance of fungi in the context of UK tree planting’. Food and Energy Security
SPUN, Mycorrhizal fungi: the missing link in climate-smart restoration
Various recent reporting and summaries on under-protected mycorrhizal fungal hotspots and fungal conservation risk from the Conversation
Lewton, T. 2026. ‘Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it?’ New Scientist