By now, everyone in nature finance knows the number: $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The Paulson Institute documented it in 2020. Costanza valued ecosystem services at $33 trillion in 1997. The Dasgupta Review made the economic case definitive.

The gap persists not because we lack awareness. It persists because nature finance needed to evolve — from reactive to proactive, from single-metric to holistic, from bridges to legacy systems to native infrastructure built for how ecological value actually flows.

Below is a map of that evolution, what's emerging, and why ensurance might be the coordination layer that finally closes it.

Nature finance has moved through distinct phases, each building on the last.

Humans have traded natural resources since civilization began — timber, furs, fisheries, minerals. This was the original nature finance, but it treated nature as an extractable commodity. The goal was removal, not protection. Markets existed, but they valued nature dead, not alive.

Ecological economics emerged in the 1970s-80s, with Herman Daly and colleagues challenging the assumption that natural capital was infinite. Daly's steady-state economics grounded the economy in biophysical limits — recognizing that throughput (resource extraction and waste) must stay within ecological boundaries.

Ecosystem services valuation followed. Costanza and colleagues proved that ecosystem services have quantifiable economic value — not to commodify nature, but to make invisible value visible in a language economic systems could hear.

Environmental accounting formalized measurement. The UN's System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) provided standardized frameworks. SEEA Ecosystem Accounting (adopted 2021) has been applied in 34+ countries to track ecosystem extent, condition, and service flows. FEMA and other agencies now use ecosystem service valuation in cost-benefit analyses for nature-based solutions.

Key contribution: Proved nature provides real, measurable value — $125 trillion annually in ecosystem services. Created accounting standards to track it.

Gap: Valuation alone doesn't create funding mechanisms. Knowing something is valuable doesn't automatically route capital to protect it.

Carbon credits were the first attempt at market scale. Compliance carbon markets (EU ETS, California cap-and-trade) now exceed $850 billion annually. Voluntary carbon markets (VCM) added another layer — Verra, Gold Standard, and other registries built verification infrastructure, though at smaller scale (~$2 billion).

Regulatory compliance markets drove real restoration. Under the US Clean Water Act, wetland mitigation banking became a multi-billion dollar industry. Ecosystem Investment Partners closed its fifth fund in October 2025 with over $400 million in commitments, bringing total capital raised to nearly $1.5 billion since 2006. The UK launched mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in 2024, requiring developers to achieve 10% net biodiversity improvement.

Key contribution: Proved environmental outcomes can be measured, traded, and scaled. Created real market infrastructure.

Gap: Single-metric reductionism. Nature is more than carbon or wetland area. Quality control proved difficult — significant percentages of carbon credits lacked environmental integrity.

The first wave of regenerative finance attempted to bring environmental credits onchain. Toucan Protocol and KlimaDAO bridged existing registry credits to blockchain. Regen Network built native ecological credit infrastructure on Cosmos, enabling land stewards to issue verified credits directly.

Key contribution: Demonstrated blockchain's potential for environmental assets — transparency, liquidity, composability. Regen's approach of native verification (rather than bridging) pointed toward better architecture.

Gap: Bridging legacy credits doesn't fix underlying quality issues. CarbonPlan's analysis found the vast majority of bridged credits came from older projects that wouldn't qualify under current standards. "Zombies on the blockchain" — tokenization adds transparency but doesn't create integrity.

Biodiversity credits expanded the aperture. The EU is developing a Nature Credits Roadmap targeting a functional biodiversity market by 2027.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) attempted to turn ecosystem service value into tradable equity. The NYSE partnered with Intrinsic Exchange Group to create listed entities whose value derived from nature's productivity rather than extraction. The concept was sound; execution stalled on regulatory complexity and partisan objection.

Debt-for-nature swaps achieved real scale through creative financing. The Nature Conservancy's deals in Ecuador restructured sovereign debt in exchange for conservation commitments — $1.6 billion for Galápagos marine protection (2023) released $450 million for long-term stewardship; $1.5 billion for Amazon conservation (2024) released $460 million. Debt forgiveness in exchange for ecosystem protection.

Key contribution: Expanded beyond carbon. Creative financing structures proved massive conservation outcomes are possible when incentives align.

Gap: Biodiversity lacks a universal metric — nature's complexity resists reduction to a single unit. NACs required regulatory frameworks that don't yet exist. Debt swaps depend on sovereign debt situations and complex deal structures.

The insurance industry began experimenting with nature coverage. The world's first coral reef insurance (Mexico, 2019) and Hawaii's reef policy (2022) use parametric triggers — when a hurricane hits certain intensity, payments release automatically for restoration.

Key contribution: Fast payouts, clear triggers, real conservation outcomes. Hurricane Delta (2020) deployed nearly $850,000 for reef restoration within weeks.

Gap: Reactive by design. Insurance compensates after damage. It doesn't fund the ongoing stewardship that prevents degradation in the first place.

The next generation is taking shape:

Bioregional financing facilities — community-owned institutions channeling capital toward ecological regeneration at bioregional scale, addressing not just the funding gap but how resources flow and who decides.

The Landbanking Group — converting natural capital into tradable Nature Equity; their Landler platform measures water, soil, biodiversity, and carbon, then unitizes into transferable assets. African Parks issued the first Verifiable Nature Units from Majete Wildlife Reserve in October 2024.

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service; businesses pay for flood defense, water quality, and drought resilience while investors receive returns from predictable cashflows. Targeting £1 billion into UK nature restoration.

Interspecies money — giving non-human species economic agency through AI-assisted digital twins. In August 2024, Rwanda's mountain gorillas received the world's first cross-species payment.

Nature-based currency — monetary systems anchored to living systems rather than extraction. Current economics assigns value only to dead nature — dinosaurs, coal, oil. What if currency itself was backed by ecological health?

• Ecological economics → Grounded economy in biophysical limits, Theory ≠ implementation

• Ecosystem services valuation → Made invisible value visible, Valuation ≠ funding mechanism

• Environmental accounting (SEEA) → Standardized measurement, Accounting ≠ capital flows

• Carbon credits → Created tradable units at scale, Single metric, quality issues

• Regulatory compliance markets → Real restoration, regulatory drivers, Jurisdiction-limited, offset logic

• ReFi bridges → Added transparency and liquidity, Didn't fix underlying integrity

• Biodiversity credits → Expanded beyond carbon, No universal metric, still developing

• Debt-for-nature swaps → Massive outcomes at sovereign scale, Complex structures, situation-dependent

• Parametric insurance → Fast, automated, transparent, Reactive, event-based only

• Emerging mechanisms → New asset classes, novel agency, Nascent markets, coordination needed

Each approach advanced the field. Making them coherent and scalable requires:

1. Proactive funding — Capital that protects before damage, not compensates after

2. Holistic value — Multiple value types that don't collapse to one metric

3. Native instruments — Purpose-built for ecological value, not bridges to legacy systems

4. Continuous flows — Not one-time transactions but ongoing stewardship funding

5. Funding for natural infrastructure — Capital that treats nature as the foundation, not an externality

6. Adaptive systems — That evolve as understanding deepens

Ensurance takes lessons from each phase — codifies them, makes them legible, puts them into practice.

Proactive, not reactive. To ensure is to make certain — to ensure the benefits nature provides and the ecosystems that generate them. Insurance compensates after loss. Ensurance funds protection from day one.

Holistic, not reductive. Rather than collapsing nature to carbon or any single metric, ensurance recognizes interconnected dimensions: ecological, cultural, social, spiritual, economic. The instrumental serves the intrinsic.

Native instruments. Onchain instruments designed for ecological value:

• Coins — general, indirect funding (trading funds protection broadly)

• Certificates — specific, direct funding, yield-bearing instruments tied to named natural assets

• Agents — actors with wallets that hold assets, trade, and receive proceeds

Natural capital valuation. Ecosystems (stocks) produce ecosystem services (flows). The natural cap rate — service value divided by cost — creates shared accounting between ecology and finance. Many natural assets deliver 200-700% annual returns relative to acquisition price.

Blended finance and institutional access. The protocol operates as a member-owned blended-finance structure where risk/dependency investors and real-asset investors operate in one system. Institutional-grade vaults hold coins, certificates, and agents while institutions participate in their preferred unit: dollars.

Identity and reputation. Every agent represents place, people, or purpose. What they claim is compared against what evidence shows — holdings, activity, impact. Claims and evidence are both onchain, verifiable by humans and AI alike.

Polycentric governance. Agents and groups can be managed individually or collectively — decentralized coordination where decisions stay local but capital flows globally.

Continuous proceeds. Whether markets go up or down, trading activity continuously funds agents and flows to designated beneficiaries. Speculation funds stewardship. Arbitrage funds abundance.

The future isn't one mechanism closing the gap. It's a plurality of mechanisms working together — debt-for-nature swaps unlocking sovereign-scale capital, compliance markets driving baseline restoration, parametric insurance handling acute events, bioregional facilities governing place-based allocation, blended finance bridging capital types.

What's been missing is the connective tissue — infrastructure that routes value continuously, at any scale, with transparent accountability. Infrastructure that recognizes relational value: the worth that emerges between entities, not just within them.

Imagine thousands of agents representing watersheds, species, and stewards.

Imagine proceeds flowing to nature not once, but continuously — for decades, for centuries.

Imagine financial instruments that treat ecological health as the asset, not the externality.

"This isn't charity. It's market infrastructure for what every society, economy, and culture depends on — not a new asset class, but the oldest and most enduring asset of all."

The coordination infrastructure has arrived.

"…by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves."
— Sir David Attenborough, The Dasgupta Review (2021)

---

Find your path — whether you're an investor, corporation, insurer, landowner, or building something new, there's a way to participate. Explore solutions →

---

Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap (Paulson Institute, 2020) — foundational funding gap analysis

The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital (Costanza et al., 1997) — foundational ecosystem services valuation

System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (UN) — international natural capital accounting standard

Ecosystem Investment Partners Fund V (BusinessWire, 2025) — $1.5B total raised for mitigation banking

Finance Solutions for Nature (World Economic Forum, 2025) — 10 priority financial mechanisms

Ecuador debt-for-nature swaps (Reuters, 2024) — TNC Nature Bonds program

UK Biodiversity Net Gain (UK Government) — mandatory biodiversity credits

EU Nature Credits Roadmap (European Commission, 2025) — biodiversity market development

Bioregional Financing Facilities (BioFi, 2024) — community-owned ecological finance

The Landbanking Group — Nature Equity and biodiversity units

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service

Interspecies Money (Project Syndicate, 2024) — cross-species payments

Zombies on the blockchain (CarbonPlan, 2022) — carbon credit quality analysis

The Dasgupta Review (UK Government, 2021) — economics of biodiversity

By now, everyone in nature finance knows the number: $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The Paulson Institute documented it in 2020. Costanza valued ecosystem services at $33 trillion in 1997. The Dasgupta Review made the economic case definitive.

The gap persists not because we lack awareness. It persists because nature finance needed to evolve — from reactive to proactive, from single-metric to holistic, from bridges to legacy systems to native infrastructure built for how ecological value actually flows.

Below is a map of that evolution, what's emerging, and why ensurance might be the coordination layer that finally closes it.

Nature finance has moved through distinct phases, each building on the last.

Humans have traded natural resources since civilization began — timber, furs, fisheries, minerals. This was the original nature finance, but it treated nature as an extractable commodity. The goal was removal, not protection. Markets existed, but they valued nature dead, not alive.

Ecological economics emerged in the 1970s-80s, with Herman Daly and colleagues challenging the assumption that natural capital was infinite. Daly's steady-state economics grounded the economy in biophysical limits — recognizing that throughput (resource extraction and waste) must stay within ecological boundaries.

Ecosystem services valuation followed. Costanza and colleagues proved that ecosystem services have quantifiable economic value — not to commodify nature, but to make invisible value visible in a language economic systems could hear.

Environmental accounting formalized measurement. The UN's System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) provided standardized frameworks. SEEA Ecosystem Accounting (adopted 2021) has been applied in 34+ countries to track ecosystem extent, condition, and service flows. FEMA and other agencies now use ecosystem service valuation in cost-benefit analyses for nature-based solutions.

Key contribution: Proved nature provides real, measurable value — $125 trillion annually in ecosystem services. Created accounting standards to track it.

Gap: Valuation alone doesn't create funding mechanisms. Knowing something is valuable doesn't automatically route capital to protect it.

Carbon credits were the first attempt at market scale. Compliance carbon markets (EU ETS, California cap-and-trade) now exceed $850 billion annually. Voluntary carbon markets (VCM) added another layer — Verra, Gold Standard, and other registries built verification infrastructure, though at smaller scale (~$2 billion).

Regulatory compliance markets drove real restoration. Under the US Clean Water Act, wetland mitigation banking became a multi-billion dollar industry. Ecosystem Investment Partners closed its fifth fund in October 2025 with over $400 million in commitments, bringing total capital raised to nearly $1.5 billion since 2006. The UK launched mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in 2024, requiring developers to achieve 10% net biodiversity improvement.

Key contribution: Proved environmental outcomes can be measured, traded, and scaled. Created real market infrastructure.

Gap: Single-metric reductionism. Nature is more than carbon or wetland area. Quality control proved difficult — significant percentages of carbon credits lacked environmental integrity.

The first wave of regenerative finance attempted to bring environmental credits onchain. Toucan Protocol and KlimaDAO bridged existing registry credits to blockchain. Regen Network built native ecological credit infrastructure on Cosmos, enabling land stewards to issue verified credits directly.

Key contribution: Demonstrated blockchain's potential for environmental assets — transparency, liquidity, composability. Regen's approach of native verification (rather than bridging) pointed toward better architecture.

Gap: Bridging legacy credits doesn't fix underlying quality issues. CarbonPlan's analysis found the vast majority of bridged credits came from older projects that wouldn't qualify under current standards. "Zombies on the blockchain" — tokenization adds transparency but doesn't create integrity.

Biodiversity credits expanded the aperture. The EU is developing a Nature Credits Roadmap targeting a functional biodiversity market by 2027.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) attempted to turn ecosystem service value into tradable equity. The NYSE partnered with Intrinsic Exchange Group to create listed entities whose value derived from nature's productivity rather than extraction. The concept was sound; execution stalled on regulatory complexity and partisan objection.

Debt-for-nature swaps achieved real scale through creative financing. The Nature Conservancy's deals in Ecuador restructured sovereign debt in exchange for conservation commitments — $1.6 billion for Galápagos marine protection (2023) released $450 million for long-term stewardship; $1.5 billion for Amazon conservation (2024) released $460 million. Debt forgiveness in exchange for ecosystem protection.

Key contribution: Expanded beyond carbon. Creative financing structures proved massive conservation outcomes are possible when incentives align.

Gap: Biodiversity lacks a universal metric — nature's complexity resists reduction to a single unit. NACs required regulatory frameworks that don't yet exist. Debt swaps depend on sovereign debt situations and complex deal structures.

The insurance industry began experimenting with nature coverage. The world's first coral reef insurance (Mexico, 2019) and Hawaii's reef policy (2022) use parametric triggers — when a hurricane hits certain intensity, payments release automatically for restoration.

Key contribution: Fast payouts, clear triggers, real conservation outcomes. Hurricane Delta (2020) deployed nearly $850,000 for reef restoration within weeks.

Gap: Reactive by design. Insurance compensates after damage. It doesn't fund the ongoing stewardship that prevents degradation in the first place.

The next generation is taking shape:

Bioregional financing facilities — community-owned institutions channeling capital toward ecological regeneration at bioregional scale, addressing not just the funding gap but how resources flow and who decides.

The Landbanking Group — converting natural capital into tradable Nature Equity; their Landler platform measures water, soil, biodiversity, and carbon, then unitizes into transferable assets. African Parks issued the first Verifiable Nature Units from Majete Wildlife Reserve in October 2024.

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service; businesses pay for flood defense, water quality, and drought resilience while investors receive returns from predictable cashflows. Targeting £1 billion into UK nature restoration.

Interspecies money — giving non-human species economic agency through AI-assisted digital twins. In August 2024, Rwanda's mountain gorillas received the world's first cross-species payment.

Nature-based currency — monetary systems anchored to living systems rather than extraction. Current economics assigns value only to dead nature — dinosaurs, coal, oil. What if currency itself was backed by ecological health?

• Ecological economics → Grounded economy in biophysical limits, Theory ≠ implementation

• Ecosystem services valuation → Made invisible value visible, Valuation ≠ funding mechanism

• Environmental accounting (SEEA) → Standardized measurement, Accounting ≠ capital flows

• Carbon credits → Created tradable units at scale, Single metric, quality issues

• Regulatory compliance markets → Real restoration, regulatory drivers, Jurisdiction-limited, offset logic

• ReFi bridges → Added transparency and liquidity, Didn't fix underlying integrity

• Biodiversity credits → Expanded beyond carbon, No universal metric, still developing

• Debt-for-nature swaps → Massive outcomes at sovereign scale, Complex structures, situation-dependent

• Parametric insurance → Fast, automated, transparent, Reactive, event-based only

• Emerging mechanisms → New asset classes, novel agency, Nascent markets, coordination needed

Each approach advanced the field. Making them coherent and scalable requires:

1. Proactive funding — Capital that protects before damage, not compensates after

2. Holistic value — Multiple value types that don't collapse to one metric

3. Native instruments — Purpose-built for ecological value, not bridges to legacy systems

4. Continuous flows — Not one-time transactions but ongoing stewardship funding

5. Funding for natural infrastructure — Capital that treats nature as the foundation, not an externality

6. Adaptive systems — That evolve as understanding deepens

Ensurance takes lessons from each phase — codifies them, makes them legible, puts them into practice.

Proactive, not reactive. To ensure is to make certain — to ensure the benefits nature provides and the ecosystems that generate them. Insurance compensates after loss. Ensurance funds protection from day one.

Holistic, not reductive. Rather than collapsing nature to carbon or any single metric, ensurance recognizes interconnected dimensions: ecological, cultural, social, spiritual, economic. The instrumental serves the intrinsic.

Native instruments. Onchain instruments designed for ecological value:

• Coins — general, indirect funding (trading funds protection broadly)

• Certificates — specific, direct funding, yield-bearing instruments tied to named natural assets

• Agents — actors with wallets that hold assets, trade, and receive proceeds

Natural capital valuation. Ecosystems (stocks) produce ecosystem services (flows). The natural cap rate — service value divided by cost — creates shared accounting between ecology and finance. Many natural assets deliver 200-700% annual returns relative to acquisition price.

Blended finance and institutional access. The protocol operates as a member-owned blended-finance structure where risk/dependency investors and real-asset investors operate in one system. Institutional-grade vaults hold coins, certificates, and agents while institutions participate in their preferred unit: dollars.

Identity and reputation. Every agent represents place, people, or purpose. What they claim is compared against what evidence shows — holdings, activity, impact. Claims and evidence are both onchain, verifiable by humans and AI alike.

Polycentric governance. Agents and groups can be managed individually or collectively — decentralized coordination where decisions stay local but capital flows globally.

Continuous proceeds. Whether markets go up or down, trading activity continuously funds agents and flows to designated beneficiaries. Speculation funds stewardship. Arbitrage funds abundance.

The future isn't one mechanism closing the gap. It's a plurality of mechanisms working together — debt-for-nature swaps unlocking sovereign-scale capital, compliance markets driving baseline restoration, parametric insurance handling acute events, bioregional facilities governing place-based allocation, blended finance bridging capital types.

What's been missing is the connective tissue — infrastructure that routes value continuously, at any scale, with transparent accountability. Infrastructure that recognizes relational value: the worth that emerges between entities, not just within them.

Imagine thousands of agents representing watersheds, species, and stewards.

Imagine proceeds flowing to nature not once, but continuously — for decades, for centuries.

Imagine financial instruments that treat ecological health as the asset, not the externality.

"This isn't charity. It's market infrastructure for what every society, economy, and culture depends on — not a new asset class, but the oldest and most enduring asset of all."

The coordination infrastructure has arrived.

"…by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves."
— Sir David Attenborough, The Dasgupta Review (2021)

---

Find your path — whether you're an investor, corporation, insurer, landowner, or building something new, there's a way to participate. Explore solutions →

---

Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap (Paulson Institute, 2020) — foundational funding gap analysis

The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital (Costanza et al., 1997) — foundational ecosystem services valuation

System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (UN) — international natural capital accounting standard

Ecosystem Investment Partners Fund V (BusinessWire, 2025) — $1.5B total raised for mitigation banking

Finance Solutions for Nature (World Economic Forum, 2025) — 10 priority financial mechanisms

Ecuador debt-for-nature swaps (Reuters, 2024) — TNC Nature Bonds program

UK Biodiversity Net Gain (UK Government) — mandatory biodiversity credits

EU Nature Credits Roadmap (European Commission, 2025) — biodiversity market development

Bioregional Financing Facilities (BioFi, 2024) — community-owned ecological finance

The Landbanking Group — Nature Equity and biodiversity units

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service

Interspecies Money (Project Syndicate, 2024) — cross-species payments

Zombies on the blockchain (CarbonPlan, 2022) — carbon credit quality analysis

The Dasgupta Review (UK Government, 2021) — economics of biodiversity