Nature Futures 25: Event Recap
“Nature is the foundation of a healthy economy and society, and it’s no longer enough to simply protect what remains. We need to restore what has been lost.”
That was the message from Ciaran Forde, Business Development Manager (Ireland) at Wilderway, as he described their rewilding work in Portugal in collaboration with Rewilding Portugal.
Nature Futures 25 brought together a diverse group of speakers working across sectors and scales, each passionate, driven, and united by a shared commitment to accelerating the transition to a nature-positive future. Throughout the sessions, they highlighted both the opportunities ahead and the challenges that must be addressed collectively.
The keynote session featured Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda, founder of Restorae, who offered a candid look at his entrepreneurial journey, charting rapid progress and personal lessons learned along the way. His reflections on timing, privilege, responsibility, and the realities of navigating opportunity provided both motivation and a grounding perspective. He also shared insights into his work across for-profit and non-profit organisations aimed at mobilising different stakeholder groups to catalyse meaningful change.
The fireside chat with Doris Schenpf and Ivan Murcia Vicente, two landscape architects in the green building sector, traced the evolution of urban nature-based solutions over the past decade, from green roofs as an aesthetic luxury to an essential tool for improving quality of life and urban resilience. They explored how advances in AI-powered technologies have improved the affordability and accessibility of impact measurement, enabling clearer communication with investors. Doris emphasised the importance of financial models that incentivise co-creation and collaboration, while Ivan highlighted the mindset shift and urgency required to drive a nature-positive transformation of the sector.
The panel on “New Opportunities in Financing Nature” brought together speakers representing a spectrum of investment models, from banks to nature accelerators, nature credit developers, and impact VCs. The discussion saw how banks utilise blended finance structures to unlock value creation and cash flow while ensuring returns for institutions that are accountable to savers. It quickly moved to the challenges of funding nature, with the need for clearer regulations emerging as a dominant theme. Zoe Peden (Ananda Impact VC) spoke about how regulatory uncertainty slows down startups, affecting their growth and autonomy, often pushing them toward equity investment. Thomas Van Craen (Triodos Bank Belgium) emphasised the importance of cross-border networks and revisiting internal policies to strengthen and modify support for nature projects. Thomas Gmeiner (Brainforest) highlighted the challenge of matchmaking, ensuring the right investor finds the right company, which they address by offering smaller, more accessible ticket sizes and digital platforms for monitoring. Ciaran Forde noted that while rapid technological advances are helping resolve data and measurement challenges, a deeper issue remains: the lack of clear motivation for businesses to invest in nature restoration.
In the closing Q&A, Thomas Van Craen encouraged a collective transition by appealing to businesses’ sense of moral responsibility, supported by enabling regulatory frameworks. Ciaran closed the event with a compelling call to action, reminding everyone that
“the best time to invest in nature was probably 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. We don’t have time to wait.”
You can read the key takeaways in the Resources section and access the session recordings on YouTube.