Nature finance
Overview
The Group's nature finance work covers the financing needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, the integration of nature-related risks and dependencies into financial decision-making, and the design of financial products and policy instruments that channel capital towards nature-positive outcomes.
We treat nature as a financial as well as an ecological subject: a domain in which firms, sovereigns, and financial institutions face material risks, dependencies, and impacts that are not yet adequately measured, priced, or governed. Closing those gaps is a precondition for mobilising the capital needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss at the scale and pace the science requires.
Investing in nature at scale: the nature proposition gap and how to close it
Our field has built an extraordinary infrastructure of frameworks, targets, taxonomies, and reporting standards, for climate and for nature alike. We have made things elaborate, layered, and complex, because complexity is what institutions and the smart people working in them like to produce. It is also what conservation and conservation science gravitate towards. Ecology and earth systems are complex, and understanding that complexity is a virtue. But there is a difference between understanding complexity and being paralysed by it.
We need fewer new frameworks or new ways of saying the same old thing. What we need more of are compelling propositions at a scale that institutional capital can actually back.
A proposition is what turns a good idea into something that gets funded and built. It packages a defined problem, a credible solution, a delivery vehicle, and a funding model into something that investors can price, governments can support across electoral cycles, and communities can see the point of. Japan's Shinkansen network. The US Interstate Highway System. The Channel Tunnel. Crossrail. The Gotthard Base Tunnel. None of these was easy. Some were late and over budget. But they happened because people created a clear enough proposition to organise capital and political will around.
Resilience and nature investment largely lack large-scale propositions like that. Instead, we have thousands of individually worthy but subscale projects, each competing separately for limited funding, each too small to interest institutional investors, and each bearing the full overhead of its own consenting, procurement, and monitoring. Landscape-scale resilience and nature propositions do not get put to finance ministries. They are not part of the debate about which national infrastructure priorities should get funded. Why not? Because nobody is bringing forward propositions big enough or compelling enough to be part of that conversation.
One example of what a proposition could look like is an East Coast Resilience Arc in the UK, packaging coastal flood defences, habitat restoration along the East Atlantic Flyway, and community economic transition into a single, large-scale programme that a pension fund or sovereign wealth fund can engage with at national scale.
Our research and convening work in nature finance is organised around closing this proposition gap: identifying or supporting the development of fifty propositions globally that are nationally or regionally significant for both nature and climate resilience, each fully costed, each with a business case that can stand up to scrutiny from a finance ministry or an investment committee.
Our work
The cluster combines work on risk, impact, and dependency assessment for financial institutions with research on the financial products, policy instruments, and supervisory frameworks needed to channel capital towards nature-positive outcomes. We work in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment.
Research topics include:
- Asset-level data and geospatial monitoring of nature-related exposures and outcomes.
- Private finance for nature recovery, including blended finance, biodiversity credits, and outcomes-based instruments.
- Nature in transition planning, stewardship, and corporate strategy.
- Designing investable, place-based nature and resilience propositions at the scale that institutional capital can absorb.
Projects, programmes, and special initiatives
Spatial Finance Initiative (SFI)
Established to bring together research capabilities in space, data science, and financial services and make them greater than the sum of their parts. The Initiative undertakes and coordinates academic research and channels it into real-world finance-related applications.
Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR)
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) draws on and consolidates the world-leading expertise of Oxford University and its partners to address the challenge of delivering effective and socially inclusive nature recovery at scale, in support of goals to reverse national and global biodiversity decline by the end of this decade.
Energy Transition Risk and Cost of Capital Project (ETRC)
Beginning with the energy sector, ETRC explores how to rebalance the cost of capital in favour of clean rather than polluting assets. The cost of capital is a critical transmission mechanism between the financial and real economies as it drives capital allocation. To shift capital flows across the global economy as part of the net-zero transition, the cost of capital for dirty assets needs to increase substantially, and it needs to fall for clean assets.
India Transition Finance Programme (ITFP)
The India Transition Finance Programme provides best-practice research and capacity building to support the adoption and use of high-quality transition finance in India. India is entering a decisive decade. The transformation of the electricity, transport, industry, and land-use sectors is already underway, and high-quality transition finance will determine the speed and success of this shift.
ITFP works closely with Indian regulators, policymakers, and market leaders to channel capital towards credible transition-aligned activities, strengthen financial resilience to climate-related risks, and support a fair and inclusive shift to a low-carbon economy. Current focus areas include energy transition risk and the cost of capital, climate-related financial risks, and climate transition plans, in synergy with the Energy Transition Risk and Cost of Capital (ETRC) project, the Environmental Stress Testing and Scenarios (ESTS) project, and the Net Zero Transition Plans (NZTP) project.
Sustainable Finance Theme at The Alan Turing Institute
Hosted at The Alan Turing Institute, the theme brings together data science and AI capabilities with sustainable finance research. It supports work across our agentic finance, spatial finance, and nature finance clusters.
UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment (CGFI)
CGFI was a programme established in 2021 by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) via the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Innovate UK. The need to establish CGFI was identified in the UK Green Finance Strategy 2019 to support the accelerated use of climate and environmental data and analytics by financial institutions and to connect science with finance.
Funding was made available by UKRI to run CGFI for three years, extended by 1.5 years in 2024 and ending in September 2025. The consortium was led by the University of Oxford in partnership with the University of Bristol, Imperial College London, the University of Leeds, the University of Reading, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, The Alan Turing Institute, and the Satellite Applications Catapult.
While CGFI's UKRI-funded multi-year programme has ended, CGFI's work continues through programmes it has established or helped to establish, and through the ongoing work being taken forward at each of its host institutions. Details: https://cgfi.ac.uk
CGFI's origins, impact, and legacy are documented in our impact report: https://cgfi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Report_CGFI_2025_Final-2025.pdf
Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT)
The Transition Plan Taskforce was active from April 2022 to October 2024. The TPT engaged with over 600 organisations globally, including financial institutions, corporates, governments, regulators, and civil society. This inclusive approach led to the development of a comprehensive set of materials to guide transition plan disclosures.
The TPT's legacy is set out at https://itpn.global/tpt-legacy/. TPT materials, now the responsibility of the IFRS Foundation, are available at https://www.ifrs.org/sustainability/knowledge-hub/transition-plan-taskforce-resources/.
Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI)
The Alliance was founded in 2017 by a network of global research universities to promote rigorous and highly impactful academic research on sustainable finance and investment.
Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI)
Examining the legal basis for directors and trustees to consider, manage, and report on climate change-related risk, and the circumstances in which they may be liable for failing to do so.
Global Resilience Index Initiative (GRII)
The Global Resilience Index Initiative (GRII) provides reference data on climate and natural hazard risks to inform and protect populations and economies, particularly in emerging and developing countries, and forms a basis for mobilising the trillions of investment needed to meet the Paris goals on climate-resilient development. This information is open and accessible to all using shared standards and consistent metrics at local to global scales.