I first watched How to Live on Earth (https://howtoliveonearth.net/), the new film introduced by Benedict Cumberbatch, a month or so ago. Yesterday I got to watch a ten minutes excerpt of it again at the Harborside Suite at M Shed in Bristol, at the Office for Investment’s Investing in Nature event, in a room full of investors, bankers, officials, farmers and project developers, shortly after I completed a panel on building a sustainable market for nature. You could feel that the short clip truly resonated with that audience, and I agree with a so much of the film, although not quite all of it.
One of its central ideas is a familiar one in nature finance, but the film expresses it rather neatly. We know how to value a tree once it has been cut down, because timber has a price and can be bought, sold and accounted for. The living tree is harder for it stores carbon, slows water, protects soil, supports other species and forms part of something much larger than itself, yet most of that work takes place without anybody paying for it. The film’s conclusion is that this reflects a failure in the way our economy sees nature: dead nature is visible to markets, while living nature largely is not.
For me that diagnosis feels broadly right. I think where I become less certain is in what follows, because there is a contradiction running through the film. For much of its running time, How to Live on Earth shows very effectively that nature works because things are connected. Yet when it reaches finance, it begins to separate those connections again so that we can measure them, price them and, ultimately, turn them into investable units.
That matters because many of the film’s strongest examples depend on the opposite insight. The elephants in Chad, for instance, are not valuable simply because there are more elephants. They alter the landscape, keep waterholes open, influence vegetation and help maintain the wider savanna. Their importance lies in the relationships they sustain and in the effects they have on the whole system around them.
The forest sequences make much the same point in a different way. A plantation can contain a great many trees and still not function like a forest. A forest depends on soils, fungi, water, insects, animals and trees interacting over time, and what matters is not simply the presence of these individual elements but the relationships between them. That distinction, between a collection of assets and a functioning system, seems to me increasingly important for nature finance.
One Earth system, seven warning lights
It is also one of the reasons the recently published Planetary Health Check 2026 makes such an interesting companion to the film. The headline findings are stark enough: seven of the nine Planetary Boundaries have now been transgressed and all seven are continuing to move in the wrong direction. Climate change and biosphere integrity are well beyond their boundaries; land-system change and freshwater change are outside the safe operating space; nitrogen and phosphorus flows are deep into the high-risk zone; ocean acidification has crossed its global boundary; and novel entities such as plastics and persistent chemicals continue to accumulate faster than their consequences can properly be assessed.
It would be easy to treat those as seven environmental problems, each sitting in its own policy box: climate here, water there, biodiversity somewhere else. But the report’s argument is more troubling than that, because these systems do not operate independently. Climate affects forests, forests affect rainfall, water affects vegetation, biodiversity affects the ability of ecosystems to keep functioning, and nutrient loading changes rivers, lakes and coastal waters. Damage in one part of the system can weaken resilience somewhere else and, in some cases, push the whole system closer to tipping points. We describe nine boundaries because we need some way to organise the science, but there is only one Earth system.
That creates a difficult question for finance, because finance is much more comfortable with simple, separable things. The film’s answer is to make ecosystem services more visible: measure clean water, carbon storage, flood protection and other benefits, attach values to them, and create vehicles through which investors can own an interest in those services. The logic is straightforward enough: if the ecosystem becomes healthier and produces more valuable services, the financial asset should increase in value too.
I can see the attraction, and I certainly do not think the answer is to reject markets or measurement. Nature finance needs both - capital requires structures, investors need some understanding of risk and return, and in most cases someone ultimately has to pay for the outcome. Carbon markets, biodiversity markets, payments for ecosystem services, water quality contracts and natural flood management payments can all help to change decisions where the economics would otherwise favour degradation. My concern is a subtly different one. Financing nature and financialising nature aren't quite the same thing.
A wetland can reduce flooding, improve water quality, store carbon, provide habitat, cool the surrounding landscape and improve people’s experience of the place in which they live. We can value each of those things separately, and sometimes it is useful to do so, but the wetland does not produce them separately. They emerge from the same living system. If we begin with the ecosystem services and work backwards towards the ecology, we risk protecting the things for which we have buyers while quietly neglecting those for which we do not, and that is where I become a little uneasy. Markets are very good at paying attention to what can be measured and traded, but ecology does not conveniently stop at the edge of the spreadsheet. The danger is that we make nature legible to finance by simplifying it until finance can understand it, and in doing so solve the financial problem without quite solving the ecological one.
The Planetary Health Check makes this more than a theoretical concern. One of its most important findings this year is that the land carbon sink may already be weakening. Climate models have generally assumed that forests, wetlands and other terrestrial ecosystems will continue to absorb a significant share of human carbon emissions, yet the report notes signs that this buffering capacity is beginning to stagnate or decline. Biosphere integrity is not simply another environmental issue sitting alongside climate change, rather it is part of the climate system itself. If ecological resilience weakens far enough, some of the assumptions underpinning our climate pathways weaken with it.
Nature is infrastructure, and it is shared
This is one reason I have really enjoyed seeing the growing interest in the idea of nature as infrastructure, and it was striking how quickly that idea has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Defra’s Growing Places paper, published at the end of October, states that “a thriving natural environment is a critical part of the infrastructure on which our economy depends”. Dr Robin Daniels, reflecting on yesterday’s launch, put it more bluntly: “Nature is infrastructure. It’s time we started financing it that way” (https://lnkd.in/p/eeKJ-hqx).
The analogy is imperfect, and forests are obviously not bridges or power grids, but it changes the way we ask the question. We do not usually value a national electricity grid by pricing every electron flowing through it. We are interested in whether the system works, whether it is resilient and whether it continues to provide something on which the rest of the economy depends. The same logic can apply to a catchment, a forest, a peatland or a coastal wetland.
My colleague Anne Reaney added one word to the phrase at the UK Business & Biodiversity Forum this week, and it drew more reaction than anything else she said: nature is shared infrastructure (https://lnkd.in/p/eC35YU36). She is right - the word does a lot of work - and Anne points out that Lawton told us that nature needs to be bigger, better and more joined up. Scale matters ecologically, and it matters financially too, because institutional capital needs projects in the tens to hundreds of millions, not single-digit millions. But restore a landscape or a catchment at that scale and a great many organisations benefit. Water companies get cleaner, more reliable raw water, manufacturers get lower flood risk, and insurers face lower losses. Agri-food businesses get the water they need too, while roads, railways and health services avoid costs they would otherwise carry.
This is where we tend to get stuck ie regulated buyers such as water companies face value-for-money tests that can make it hard to fund schemes from which others also benefit, so the benefit that spills over to everyone else is treated as leakage. Projects stay small, with a single funder and a single outcome: precisely the opposite of what Lawton asked for, and of what markets need. As Anne put it, shared benefit should count as value, not leakage.
Perhaps what we should increasingly be financing, then, is not the individual ecosystem service but the capacity of the system to keep producing many services over time. That sounds like a small distinction, but I think it leads to quite a different way of structuring nature finance, because it means beginning with ecological function and then building the financing around it, rather than beginning with whatever happens to be easiest to monetise. There will still be multiple payers, and that is a strength rather than a complication. Those cash flows can be aggregated, contracted and financed. The important thing is not to confuse the revenue model with the asset itself. The asset here is the functioning catchment.
What the new report gets right
That is also, I think, the deeper message of the report launched at yesterday’s event, UK natural capital and ecosystem services: a pathway to at-scale investment capital flows, written by Rob Jordan of North Devon Biosphere Enterprises and Dr Robin Daniels for the Office for Investment. Its central argument is straightforward: the UK has promising natural capital projects but too few investable portfolios. Some of its lines deserve to be pinned above the desk of anyone working in this field. “The main problem is not lack of investment interest”, “The missing middle in the UK is often origination, not capital", and, my personal favourite, scaling nature finance “is as much an operating-system challenge as a capital-markets challenge”.
That last point is the systems argument turned on finance itself. We will not finance connected ecosystems through disconnected projects, each with its own bespoke contract, its own metric and its own lonely buyer. The report’s pathway reflects this: regional aggregation platforms that bundle projects, outcomes and funders; anchor buyers such as water companies, flood authorities and infrastructure operators; aligning nature with the much larger flows already going into water, energy, transport and farming; standardised monitoring, registries and claims; and benchmark portfolios rather than an endless series of pilots. Robin summarised it well: the task is to build “financing structures that connect those who benefit with those who can pay”. From valuing nature to financing it; from individual projects to investable portfolios.
Capital follows contracts
The lesson I keep coming back to is from renewable energy. Wind and solar did not become mainstream investments mainly because turbines and panels got cheaper (altho for sure that helped!). They became mainstream because the cash flows became certain. Contracts for Difference, with a creditworthy, government-owned counterparty standing behind them, turned promising projects into an asset class, and the cost of capital fell accordingly => capital follows contracts.
Nature’s missing piece is the same. It has many beneficiaries, but few long-term, creditworthy counterparties prepared to stand behind twenty-year contracts. Pooling funding from several beneficiaries, as Growing Places rightly proposes, is the right instinct, but a partnership is not yet a revenue stream. The next step is to turn shared benefit into contracted cash flows.
The renewables analogy also shows where to be careful. Electricity is a standard unit and it is metered; a hectare of saltmarsh is totally different to a hectare of limestone grassland, and nature is assessed rather than metered. So the lesson is to standardise the contract, not the ecosystem (we've talked about this before!).
Where the film’s tension becomes practical
There is one place where the film’s contradiction stops being philosophical and becomes a matter of contract drafting: the question of how different payments for the same piece of land are combined, sometimes called stacking. Defra has just published draft principles on exactly this and I think that they matter more than their technical title suggests.
It helps to recognise that there are really two different kinds of buyer. Some buyers pay for nature as a substitute for harm they cause elsewhere: a developer buying biodiversity units, or a company offsetting emissions. They need discrete, exclusive units, and rightly so, because the same unit must never be used to offset two harms. Other buyers pay for what a landscape does: a railway that wants its line to stay open, a network operator that wants its substations dry, a water company that wants cleaner water at the intake. They do not need to own a slice of the ecosystem. Several of them can pay for the same hydrological function at once, much as tenants share a service charge, because each consumes its own benefit and none of them claims to cancel out a harm.
As Anne put it, credits and units will suit some buyers, and contracts for services will suit others. The risk is that rules designed, quite properly, to stop double counting in offset markets end up treating genuine service contracts as competing claims, and so force us back into slicing the system into units. Getting this distinction right is, in practice, how we finance the functioning catchment rather than a pile of separable services.
The Klamath, and the health of the people in the room
The film’s account of the Klamath River makes the system point particularly well. Four dams had disrupted the river for decades and salmon populations had collapsed. After a long political and legal battle, the dams were removed. The salmon returned, quickly and in numbers, travelling more than 200 miles into reaches of the river that had been inaccessible to them for more than a century. What struck me about that story is that the restoration did not depend on identifying a separate price for every ecological function of the river. The intervention restored the conditions under which the system could begin to recover, and the ecology did the rest.
There is another strand in the film which could easily be treated as a separate topic but probably should not be. It looks at prisoners caring for endangered turtles, forest therapy in South Korea, hospitals in Singapore designed around vegetation, and cities deliberately making more room for nature. We usually file that material under health and wellbeing, but I am not sure it belongs in a separate box either. We evolved inside the living world we are now degrading, so it would be surprising if our physical and psychological health were somehow independent of it. The Planetary Health Check begins in much the same place, drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems that understand forests, water, biodiversity and people as parts of a connected whole.
There is something slightly uncomfortable in the fact that we are now rediscovering, through increasingly sophisticated Earth-system science, something that many cultures have understood for a very long time.
Bristol was a fitting place to have this conversation. The West of England was the first region in England to publish its Local Nature Recovery Strategy, and projects such as River Frome Reconnected are already exploring how downstream beneficiaries might pay for upstream flood management. As one attendee observed afterwards, the West of England and the wider South West will be a place to watch for natural capital investment. I agree, and for a particular reason: it is a good place to test whether shared benefit can be turned into contracted value at landscape scale.
Everything is connected
Everything is connected is an easy phrase to say, but building an economy that behaves as though it is true is much harder. For the last couple of centuries we have become exceptionally good at breaking complicated things into manageable units. Companies become assets, economies become sectors, nature becomes resources, and environmental problems become carbon, water, biodiversity and pollution. Those distinctions are useful, and I use them all the time, but they are abstractions, and abstractions become dangerous when we forget that they are abstractions.
I suspect this is where the next stage of nature finance needs to go. Not away from measurement, markets or investable structures, because all three are needed, but towards financial structures capable of dealing with something messier than a commodity and more interconnected than most conventional assets. Standardise the wrapper, not the ecology. Capital markets need repeatability and comparability, but ecological systems do not become less complex simply because finance would prefer them to be.
How to Live on Earth talks about humanity becoming a positive planetary force and moving from intelligence towards something closer to wisdom. It is a grand way of putting it, but the practical version is more straightforward. We need to stop degrading the systems on which we depend, restore the ones we have already damaged, and find ways of directing capital towards that process without first requiring nature to behave like a conventional financial asset.
The Planetary Health Check suggests that we do not have unlimited time to work this out. Seven of the nine warning lights are already flashing, so, yes, making biodiversity bankable may be part of the answer. But I increasingly think the more important question runs the other way. Can we make finance capable of understanding the living systems it is being asked to finance?
Yesterday’s room suggested that this is no longer only a philosophical question. It is a practical one, about counterparties, contracts and whether shared benefit counts as value rather than leakage.
References:
[1] How to Live on Earth (2026), Open Planet Studios, presented by Benedict Cumberbatch. Available at: howtoliveonearth.net. See also UNDP, How to Live on Earth.
[2] Planetary Boundaries Science Lab, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (2026) Planetary Health Check 2026. Reported in Down To Earth, Seven of nine planetary boundaries transgressed with worsening trends, 22 September 2026.
[3] Defra (2026) Growing Places: Mobilising private finance for local nature recovery, 26 October 2026, including draft principles for combining environmental payments.
[4] Lawton, J.H. et al. (2010) Making Space for Nature: a review of England’s wildlife sites and ecological network. Report to Defra.
[5] Office for Investment/North Devon Biosphere Enterprises (2026) UK natural capital and ecosystem services: a pathway to at-scale investment capital flows, 5 November 2026.
[6] UK Government, Contracts for Difference; Low Carbon Contracts Company, Contracts for Difference.
[7] West of England Nature Partnership, Local Nature Recovery Strategy; Natural England, Working together for nature: collaborating on the first Local Nature Recovery Strategy in England, 7 November 2024.