Nature-based solutions have moved from aspiration to necessity as climate shocks and biodiversity loss intensify. As economies tighten and priorities compete, what does it mean to seek a meaningful return on nature?
At Davos, panelists argued that nature has shifted from “moral imperative” to core economic infrastructure, with failures showing up in “insurance losses, in balance sheets, in disrupted food supplies… and even political instability.” André Hoffmann framed nature as a boardroom risk-management issue: firms routinely choose the “cheapest possible price” while ignoring the “premium of risk,” from flooded factories to broken supply chains. He criticized the late-20th-century creed that “the business of business is business,” urging a move from measuring income to managing impact across produced, social, human and natural capital.
WWF’s Kirsten Schuijt noted corporate understanding has grown from climate-only to “freshwater, forests, food,” especially in agriculture, but progress remains too slow. She highlighted the Tropical Forest Forever Fund as a potential paradigm shift: an investment vehicle that pays countries for “standing forests,” targets major forest basins, and channels resources to Indigenous and local communities.
Rohini Nilekani argued sustainability is already operationally profitable, citing energy savings from high-performance buildings, and called biodiversity a future “strategic advantage.” Chavalit Frederick Tsao pushed “patient capital” and a “wellbeing economy,” insisting “there’s no creativity in fear,” and urging structural change toward stewardship, “the dividend of joy,” and responsibility for the global commons.
Always beach before. Sorry. How's your work? Okay. I think this is on. Good. Good.
Good. After noon. Good afternoon everyone. My name is David Geddes. I'm managing correspondent for Climate Forward at the New York Times, where I chair our Climate Forward newsletter event series and write for the main report. And for many years now, we at the New York Times and many here at Weaf and on this stage have talked about nature justly as something we should protect. There's a sort of moral imperative to this conversation, but I think if we're being honest, we can acknowledge that that spirit of goodwill has only gotten us so far. Increasingly, it seems like if we're going to really protect nature, it will require not just charity, but real investment. And I say this not because it's just the right thing to do, though it is. I say it because with each passing day, it is increasingly clear that nature is really a vital part of our economic infrastructure. Forests regulate water systems, wetlands absorb floods, oceans stabilize food systems, and trade routes. These systems support the global economy in ways that we don't always see, and they do so until they break. And when they do, the costs don't just show up in abstract models. They show up in insurance losses, in balance sheets, in disrupted food supplies, food insecurity, and even political instability. So the data is increasingly clear. Roughly half of global GDP depends on nature and as much as a quarter of global economic output could be at risk by the end of this century if more ecosystems are not protected. And yet, right where I began, investment in restoring and protecting these systems remains wildly out of sync with the scale of the risk. So how do we change this equation? Well, yes, we need profitable investment models, not just a return on capital, but maybe we could start thinking of it as a return on nature. So to help us sort of make sense of this moment, understand what the opportunities might be. We've got a fantastic panel here. To my immediate left is Andre Hoffman, the vice chairman of Roche Holdings and the interim co-chair and member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum. We then have Kirsten Scout, director general of WWF international. Thank you for joining us. To her left is Rohini Nilekani, founder and chairwoman of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. And finally we have Fred. So Fred, thank you for joining us. Chairman of TPC Group. So with that, let's get started. And I want to start Andre with you. You, as so many of us have been arguing for years that, yes, we need to protect nature and yet talk to us from a board perspective. I argued that the, companies, perhaps the economic systems, are not fully integrating this risk into their business models. What does it look like from where you sit when you are in the room with these decision makers? What is the conversation like when it comes to actually protecting nature?
Well, thank you very much for inviting me here today. And it's a it's a it's an absolutely crucial point, and it's a point we're trying to make in a different forest since quite a number of years. Why should a company which has the board of which has the responsibility to allocate funds belonging to shareholders in the most efficient manner? Why should they pay a premium for for creating something that is sustainable and in aligned with with green, for want of a better word, green goals. And I think there are a number of, of questions that we have to ask ourselves immediately. The, the definition of success as we see it today is to increase shareholder value. And increasing shareholder value sometimes can go against the interests of the company itself. Now, you refer to our family business, the Roche Pharmaceuticals. In the, in the, in the industry of, of health, in the, in the, in the business of health, we often have to do, things which are not paying back immediately. In fact, about eight out of ten projects that go through the lab make it to the market. So, so the idea that you have to do something which does not have an immediate rate of return is not as alien as to our board. And it could be for, for example, a fast moving consumer goods company or something like this. So you need the right context. But the real the real thrust of your question is, you know, what is nature for a company. And I think for that there are two answers. One is it could be an opportunity if you identify the right things. And I can perhaps give you 1 or 2 examples of how we use that at Roche. But it is also, a huge risk, you know, and for me, that's the Trojan horse, which allows us to talk about nature in the boardroom risk. You know, when you allocate your assets, you have to protect it and protecting your asset. Once you've made the decision that you want to be in that direction has a lot to do with the whole catalog of risk management. The typical example is the car. You know, you buy a car, you wouldn't dream of driving it without any insurance. And yet when you take a business decision in, in a, in a, in a corporate environment, very often you take the decision on the basis of the cheapest possible price. And that is not including the premium of risk. You know, the factory that you build next to, next to a river and the river because of climate change, is flooding and suddenly your factory is worthless. And these are risks that you can integrate when you think about them early on. And that is the role of a board. That's what the board should do. So risk risk management is I think an important part of, of, of what we should discuss at board. And that has a lot to do with, yes, the concept of planetary boundaries, the concept that we are at the moment spending more than we have with every year, expands more than the planet can, can regenerate. I mean, the World Economic Forum has published this famous research saying that half of the world GDP, 53% of the world GDP, depends on nature. I'm sorry, I would say 100%. You know, if you have no nature, you have no humanity, you have no business, you have no dividend, you have no shareholders, and you have no panel at work.
Well, you're the co-chair of the board. You're going to fix that.
Absolutely. The of the board of of well, we have this year, for those of you who have read your papers before coming here, we've sort of devised the spirit of dialogue as the overarching theme. And we spoke about four, strategic emergencies, strategic necessities. One, of course, is growth. And that's the traditional territory of business. One is innovation. The you know, what is innovation and what does it mean? How can we manage AI? How can we make sure that AI is useful and serves the purpose we want for and all the paraphernalia around this? The third one is humanity, people. You know, how can we invest in people? The fourth one, I'm afraid, is geopolitics. We need to to talk about geopolitics, and I'm sure it will come back in our panel over the next couple of hours. Over the next couple of minutes. Relax, relax.
Settle in, folks.
And the and the fifth, of course, is and that's the first time we make it so, so, so evident. It's how can we resolve these four strategic emergency within planetary boundaries. Because yet again you cannot use something that you don't have. And we need to do that. So if you want to remember what the forum is about a simple a simple line. We want to create a resilient and sustainable growth thanks to innovation within planetary boundaries.
Yeah. Thank you. Well, and I think that new frame is incredibly crucial, especially if I may say at a moment when the overt conversation about climate change, about emissions has really receded in the public dialogue, including here over the last six years, because let me turn to you when you sit at the WWF international headquarters, you play many roles. You work with many stakeholders. One of those groups of stakeholders is the corporate community, the private sector. When you are speaking with the CEOs, the board members, do you get the sense that they appreciate to what extent their businesses are actually reliant on nature in the way that Andre just articulated, and if so, how are you starting to see them respond?
So it's a great question, and I can answer that along two lines. First of all, it's more the longer term perspective. So I was saying to you before, I've been I've been in conservation 25, 30 years. And when I started in conservation, I spent most of my time trying to explain to people what biodiversity means, what it is, trying to talk to corporates, how important it is that they, you know, look at biodiversity and climate change as part of their business decisions and supply chains. I'm an economist, and I joined WWF as one of the few economists, because most that's the other side of the coin. Most conservationists talk about intrinsic values of nature and biodiversity. So if I look if I fast forward now, 25 years later, there is a huge difference, right? So, yes, I think from the side of the corporates there is a much increased there's an increased understanding in the role that biodiversity and nature more generally, I think plays in business decisions, in supply chains and so forth. For a large part, it's also, you know, brought about by, by just the reality that, for example, climate change is happening in their own backyards, that corporates are seeing, you know, negative impacts of the loss of biodiversity directly on their supply chains and on their balance balance sheets. At the same time, from a conservation organization perspective, I think we have learned to speak the language of corporates more and more. So most of the big corporate, partners in the world we work with, right, because not because we, we love to work with corporates for the sake of working. We get attacked quite a lot for working with, with corporate organizations. But because they play such a crucial role in conservation. So there is a huge shift, I will say what used to be a conversation with corporates on climate and energy has definitely now also become a conversation with corporates on freshwater, on forests, on food. I mean, one of the biggest examples, I think, where we're seeing corporates moving into action is when it comes to agriculture and sustainable food, which is one of the biggest topics, right? If you don't have a good land and sustainable land and good soil, which is at the basis of everything, you just cannot have sustainable supply chains over the long term. So, it's moving. It's definitely it's moving way too slow because we're losing losing biodiversity in basically every place we care about, unfortunately. But it's moving and there's still a long way to go.
Okay. I mean, I think that that's incredibly important to, to recognize these two things can be true at the same time. Yes, there is progress. And no, it's not nearly fast enough. Rohini, before we walked on stage, you made what I think is a critical point. And I know you bring expertise in philanthropy, but. But if I may, I want to hearken back to something you said just a few moments ago, which is that it's not enough for businesses to sort of continue with business as usual and then say, oh, yes. And by the way, as an afterthought, we'll protect nature. They, you contended, need to make some fundamental reforms to the way they operate, not protecting nature as an afterthought, but actually integrating it into the way their operations are going every single day. Could you elaborate on that thought, please?
Yeah. So for people like me, I don't run a business, but I'm a happy shareholder in my husband's company, Infosys, and they take sustainability very seriously. And they take it seriously, not just because they love nature or something. It just makes common business good sense. And I'm going to give you an example before I talk about anything else. So for example, they have become leaders in high performance buildings okay. And by continuously optimizing even their existing buildings they are able to avoid a point about 2.3 billion kilowatts of energy between 2008 and 2020. This is all meticulously recorded, which translates to something like 225 million USD in electricity bills. It just you have to to do a little. You don't even have to wait the very long run. You can get your returns. A penny saved is a penny earned kind of thing. Today, while their employee numbers are up 2.6 times, the electricity bills are up just 20%. They've kind of figured this out. And I'll tell you, many, many companies in India where we have a very dense population on a relatively small land mass, there is no way companies are going to be water secure. There is no way they're going to be supply chain secure unless they themselves go greener. There's just not enough nature to go around unless everyone's doing their best. I think I can give you several examples. I won't bore you, but a lot of industry is now headed in the direction of using as few natural resources through their supply chain as possible, and I think that's a huge shift mentally. To me, biodiversity is every country's strategic advantage in the future. Where are your future medicines going to come from? Where is your future water going to come from? How are you going to today? Heat has become such a huge issue in India. People are dying around the world because of heat. We don't notice it so much. How are you going to prevent heat urban heat islands? You're going to have to plant more trees. You're going to have to redesign some things. I think the conversation has become deadly serious in India because we are seeing what's happening, and we are also seeing how certain established best practices, some coming back to good design from our past reapplied, are beginning to make a difference. The conversation is on the table. I see a lot of philanthropic investment coming in now. The the, the corporate world has to create the new instruments financially to also bring in private capital to assist alongside philanthropic and government capital. If we don't do it, what exactly is plan B? Yeah.
Rohini, I think you make such an important point, which is that this is not a conversation about far off eventualities. This is starting to have real impact in the immediate. I think we're all seeing that no matter where our geographies are these days. Fred, you've talked a lot about patient capital. You know, you are able to take a long term view of investment and thinking about how some of these systems and payoffs may play out over not just years, but even decades or generations. And yet so much of our business world is on a much different time cycle. Most American corporations are operating on a quarterly basis. That quick churn, that rush for instantaneous profits, is becoming increasingly pervasive around the world. How do you bring that long term view to a short term world in a conversation like this?
Well, in your long term view, you have strategy for mid and short term because you need cash flow to okay. So you don't do this, you have to do a portfolio of balance. So you can take a long term view. Otherwise you died already. But before that I want to share a point about how we see inform, how we think and what we choose. Nature to the Chinese is an expression of Tao or otherwise evolutionary energy. When we are not alive, we are part of nature. Nature is not outside us. We are nature itself. Except this nature of human, which is not any animal. We are the most creative, spiritual animal which can create destruction as well as part of the creation. And so we must understand, okay, if you see it like that and you look at nature, it's really off whack. The symptoms are coming via water, rain, earthquake, human disaster, conflict. Well, this is the expression of nature because we are nature, including our greed and the evil side. And so if you understand this, is this we then not know to sustain and flourish, you must be the, the, the representative of Dao on Earth in the material form, because human is the most spiritual creative and we're working for Dao. Otherwise people might call God, or the scientists will call the evolutionary energy. So if you evolve, you know you can sustain. And change is the only observed reality and there are laws to change.
I love this perspective, and I think it's exactly the kind of kind of conversation we frankly don't have enough in forums like this, which really gets to our spirituality, to use your word, our ethical responsibility, not in some sort of abstract corporate way, but at a really human to human level. So thank you for bringing it up. I want to press you just one moment, though, because we live in a world where certain actors, many of whom are here in this town this week, have outsized influence on the lives of billions of people. And it is all too often the case that the choices they make may serve themselves, may serve business models, but don't always serve the best interests of the greatest number of people or of our natural systems. So how is it that you instill this view, this understanding of the spiritual imperative in those with the most responsibility?
Well, first of all, I saw long ago that there's a change of the definition of well-being, happiness, something that we all want, every one of us. It's our common goal. We just want to be well and happy, family well and happy. Even the forest. Well and happy. Now that's a different definition. And United Nations, let me point out, it's not GDP. Yeah, we're working for nature. So today we have a lot of people a lot of GDP. But reducing nature that is not very clever because that's all we want. So first we realize because greed will blindness and become ignorant of this which we can see today. So I started a division called active. An octave is to create this new wellbeing economy, a new way of living and so forth. So I had a conversation with my youngest son and he just finished an intern. There was a couple of years ago he finished an intern with a company and I said, hey son, we have so many things. What do you like to do in the family business? He said, I like this new division, but dad, you've been losing money for 15, 20 years, nonstop, not one year. How can I make it when you can't make it? So I told my son, that's an accounting era. They put it on an expenses and PNL because there's an accounting rule. But we are investing really long term. This is investment in progress. Think differently. And I said to him, we are a family business. What I cannot finish, you can if you can finish, your descendant can because I know this era will arrive. In fact, I see it arrived now.
Or we should be so lucky to have more stewards like you. Andre, let me return to you. In the corporate world especially, we're seeing a flurry of commitments. I mean, for all for for whatever I said about climate change taking a back seat. It's also the case that hardly a day or week goes by without a new corporate pledge to protect nature in some way or another showing up in my inbox. And yet, I mean, I'll confess, even for myself, it can be hard to distinguish between what is real, what is real progress, what is real investment in the long term, and what, frankly, is greenwashing. And I wonder, from where you sit, how do you evaluate between one and the other? How do you assess whether something is a meaningful investment that could have real returns, or is simply another pledge that's designed to garner headlines? And I wonder if you can point to some of the examples that you feel like are real working.
Well, first of all, I just try to go back to what Fred just said, you know, spirituality. And I think there is a there is a turn in the history of the planet. And for those of you who are perhaps in plenary, a couple of an hour ago, Johan Rockström showed us the latest, check. Planetary check. What does it look like? And he talks about these hockey sticks with absolutely every sort of use of resources, every result that's a negative for the environment. And I think we can put a date at about the late 70s, the beginning of the 80s, where suddenly, the business of business is business became the only prerogative of corporates. We are there to make money and there's this, this facility to say we measure profit. We measure success by the bottom, by the bottom line profitability. And suddenly it's no longer a question of morality, you know, it's we the. Sorry. Not we, because I'm a shareholder and not a manager, but they the managers have to be there to show positive results because otherwise they won't be taken seriously. So their definition of success depends on. So it's no longer immoral or it's amoral. It's just not my problem. You know my problem, my thing is to make money, and then I will distribute to society to create prosperity, and society will deal with externalities, as Milton Friedman put it, and that we all we now know, I mean, 30 years, 40 years later, it's not working. You know, you cannot ignore externalities. They come back. And so we need to do something about that. So just to say that I have a lot of respect for successful managers who over the years have created fantastic businesses who have yielded enormous amounts of money, but they have been following the wrong principle. And it's not a question of are they doing it right or they're doing it wrong or, you know, they're trying to they're trying to actually destroy the planet. They are convinced that by doing this, they they correspond to the model that they've been taught at business school, at university, I've been to business school, and that's that's what I was taught. So I just want to say that if we if we change the parameter, if we identify what it is that makes a business more successful, in particular, if we manage impact and not just income, we can get to a very different place. I'm very embarrassed because, Mark Goff, the CEO of Capitals Coalition, who, who knows much more about this than I do, he's standing there, or rather sitting. I'm sorry. You know, we need to put together an accounting system which allows us to understand the impact that as businesses we have on the social capital, the human capital and and nature. So the social capital, you know, us, the human capital, you and I, are we happy? Are we in the right place? Are we really contributing to society in the best possible way? And and then nature, of course, but nature not. I'm sorry, the panda. But but nature, the life support system. Enough. You know, how can we how can we continue to exist? How can we continue to create business if there is no nature anymore? We don't exist anymore. So? So if we can put these three parameters together, we can come to what I would call the produced capital, which is the one we measure at the moment. But if you want this produce capital to be robust, we need to take into account the three first, the, the three first impact on the three capitals. And that could be the filter on which you look at these pledges. You know, we have a we have a pledge at Roche for that. By 2040 we would be net zero. Not not net. Sorry, but absolute zero. Yeah. We now realize, you know, it's a big commitment. It's going to be very difficult to do that. So we started sustainability strategy. We have a corporate sustainability officer who refers directly to the highest echelon of the company. We've taken it step by step across the value chain. We we lower packaging, we we diminish the amount of energy needed and all these, all these really coherent systems. But we realized that there is going to be, at the end, 4 or 5%, perhaps 3% of CO2 emissions, that we're just not going to be able to do much about it if technology does not progress. Yeah. So what do we do? We invest in technology in the meantime, and then we start talking about compensation. But that's a whole new subject which you perhaps don't want to go into. The CO2 market in general is a very complicated indeed, and maybe indeed.
And it paves the way towards nature based solutions. I mean, I think that's the appropriate segue. Absolutely. Kirsten, I wonder if you could speak to some of the specific examples you're familiar with the projects out there, and you contend that there are real profitable investments in nature. You're helping put some of them together. Would you tell us about some of the ones that you could point to that you say, here is a model that is going to work.
Yeah. I mean, again, this there are so many examples and even the smaller ones I think are really, really interesting to mention. But the one that everybody talks about and that I will speak about again, because it's such an exciting opportunity, is a Tropical Forest Forever Fund, which was launched in Cop 30. And the reason why I'm pointing, I keep pointing that one out, is because it is a paradigm shift in how we think about funding. So here. So of course, tropical forests, you know, hugely under threat, incredibly important, not just locally but for the world, right. In terms of climate regulation, all sorts of environmental services, lots of beautiful species living there and lots of indigenous groups and local communities dependent on that. So, I mean, in terms of economic value, massive. Yet these are also seriously under threat. And for, you know, for decades we've been trying to work through all sorts of, processes to see, okay, how can we put an economic value on, on, on forests? How can we make sure that companies who are sourcing products or farming products, soy, beef, palm oil that are leading to deforestation, that we can turn things around, and every single time we failed, there's not been enough. So what's what's interesting about the Tropical Forest Forever Fund is it's a it's an initiative by the Brazilian government that WWF and other organizations have worked with for many, many years to get this launched at Cop 30 is number one. It's the biggest. If we get there, it's going to be the biggest fund in tropical forest. But what's cool about it is it's really about paying countries to for standing forests. So it's not about, you know, avoiding deforestation, but it's making sure, well, it's making sure that you pay you you compensate countries. And it's the three big basins. So it's the Amazon basin. It's the Congo basin. Then it's forests in Southeast Asia like Indonesia. The second thing is that it's investment. So it's not grant money. So you're so, you know, investors, whether it's governments, private sector put money in this fund and they get a return. So they get their money back, but they also get interest back. And with that, they are you know, they're going to be looking for bonds and investing it in the market. And with the profit they're going to be compensating countries to to keep their forest standing. And so the other interesting thing which which may sound minor, sitting in a panel in a forum like this, but it's actually essential, which is that this fund will allow local communities and indigenous people to access the money. If there's one thing that I've learned over all these years of conservation is that unless we really deeply engage local community, the people who live in in the Amazon forests and other places in conservation, it's not going to be sustainable. So we have to make sure that these people access the fund. That's the other cool thing about the TF. So this, I think, is one really concrete example that I think we've raised, close to 7 billion. So we still have a long way to go. We're hoping to double it by the end of this year, but this is a really important one. And there are other examples where again, the lens has been through investment. I will say one thing and I said it. I said it earlier as well. We're speaking a lot about, okay, how can we make conservation profitable, how we can put an economic value on nature, all that is important. And and for the sake of conservation, I will do it. But I will also say there is a flip side to this, and that is that companies, private sector investors, financial markets, you know, they we all have a responsibility. This isn't just about NGOs and others making sure that we finally make conservation profitable, but that we also make sure that we green the financial sector and that we make sure that nature climate conservation are part of every single discussion and decision when it comes, when it comes to risk and opportunity. So and that is another process. I just want to put that out there. Yes. You know, making making investments profitable is really important. But we also have to make sure that we keep on working closely and talking to the financial sector and the private sector to make sure that they actually integrate the impact that they have on nature and climate in their supply and in their decision making processes.
I think that's all right. On if I may, I want to introduce a case study, one that I'm very familiar with, having just written about it extensively in a recent book, and that's the company Patagonia. This is a clothing company based in California. And I bring it up because it's very relevant to this conversation. What the founder did three years ago was donate all of his equity into a new series of trusts and instructed the for profit company, which has annual profits of roughly $100 million a year, to donate all those profits to conservation and environmental activism on an ongoing basis. And this is a different model. You know, this is not Patagonia investing in parts of nature that are strategic to its supply chain, for example. But it is a for profit company saying we are going to use our profits in a fundamentally different way. To Andre's point, we are not going to follow the freedmen pursuit of profits at all costs and return of capital to shareholders. Instead, we understand that we have a different set of shareholders. That is the Earth. They talk about Earth being their only shareholder. And so, Rohini, I wonder if you could sort of pick up on that point and expand our view of the philanthropic role in this conversation, because it is the case that philanthropy can play a really important role, not only in anchoring major conservation investments, but also in sort of paving the way and showing other corporations and organizations where they might be able to go.
Yeah, thank you. David. I think I speak mostly from my experience in India, but India is pretty large, has the largest number of people on the in any country, even beyond China. And people, when people and nature are jostling together, there's always going to be conflict. And the idea of development as we see it today, when it is positioned as in opposition to nature, that's when all the problems begin. We haven't still figured out how to give up the Or and make it an and. But in India, there are a lot of civil society organizations. India is deeply connected to its biodiversity culturally for 5000 years, and people live with the wild all around us with very high tolerance. So I am lucky as a philanthropist in India that there are hundreds of very good organizations working at tiny scale to very large scale. There's the Ecological Restoration Alliance. Now, when philanthropists like myself support some of this work, it has tangible benefits on the ground for both people and nature. And when corporations around that see the benefits to people, because eventually they also have to be good neighbors. We are seeing because of something called the CSR law in India, corporate sustainability responsibility, that a lot of the philanthropic work, as an example, is picked up by corporations as part of their annual sort of giving forward. So that has worked well because we've created good examples through the work of a lot of NGOs, in how to restore, how to be stewards. We also have very good laws in India where indigenous people, people who have lived in forests for centuries, gets rights to the forest so that they can make a livelihood out of minor forest produce. But in exchange, they have to make sure that the forest stays intact. So they are stewards of the forest, but are still able to make a livelihood from it in a sustainable way. I think some of these examples can are going global. I'm very much impressed with the Tropical Forest Fund, but we need many more such things because I as a citizen, I simply cannot see the dichotomy at all between business and nature. It has to go together and we have to hold firms, especially large firms, accountable to the externalities that they are creating, that are causing so much loss to so many billions of real people on the ground, to say nothing of nature itself. So I don't see it as. But I'll tell you one thing that that's more hopeful. I personally think it's a 25 to 30 year old problem. Problem only somehow all of us together have to create the energy and the innovation to get past these 25 years. No matter what the conversation on the table. This moment, I do believe in 25 to 30 years when my grandson, who's an ardent environmentalist at nine, when he's 40 years old, I believe it will be a very different planet. We will be post the demographic bump. You know, human population is coming down quite rapidly. I think we're going to be post fossil fuel no matter what, which gives nature a chance to recover anyway. And I think we are going to be post the current kind of consumption because of the demographic shift, and automatically that means that you will be at least reducing the pillage of nature over time. So if we can get the right sort of model for just these 25 years, think of it as not a very long term problem and that we can do it. I think those of us who are alive 25, 30 years from now are going to see a very different and much greener world. I truly believe that.
That's a very provocative frame. I like that, Rohini. Yeah, and a bit of optimism as well. Fred, I wonder if you could, return us to this theme of patient capital. And I want to hear your specific examples of where you believe investing in nature works. But just briefly, not every company, as we've now acknowledged, has the luxury of being patient with its capital. So two questions. One, what advice do you give to managers and directors of corporations who are under more immediate pressure? How can they start to think more long term, behave more long term? And then can you also point to some of the examples that give you hope in this conversation?
Well, first of all, I don't think nature is everything. We're just sick so we don't get well. We die, as simple as that. Nature will correct itself, right? That's what they say. So, family business has a lot of capital, from philanthropy to various VC all the way to, industry capital or PE capital, the whole scope. So we are the best in position to use the capital to align them and tee them up a possibility. So when you're investing here, you are the possibility. Of course, you write off some as you move out. You know, like VC only need to hit one and six. You're already very well. So you think about a different thing from an investment point of view. You line it up of course your possibility. Now let's talk about one project that we do. It's a non-profit project, but actually philanthropy money can tee up downstream to impact and so forth. And I set up a Restore Nature as one of the three non-profit. I have a social called Octave Institute Restore Nature, which is linked to our industrial department. And then we have money supply chain impact investment fund management. So they look at land and sea. I used to be in the palm oil industry. Okay. Everybody know that's a real challenge in Southeast Asia is very lucrative. You know if you ask palm oil owners, you know, get out of it. You're kidding me. Your landlords. Right. So I understand I'm one of them. So I said to them, okay, I've got to sell and I'm going to do an experiment. And do a restoration. So of course in Indonesia, the carbon credit and everything forget it is you can't count on it. So we start thinking, all right, let's do a complex business model. Of course we have to deal with indigenous tribes and all the factor when you're doing it. So it's much more complete. 16 goes into it and in their we start thinking, well, how about we grow medicine, jungle medicine. Yeah. And of course there are Indonesian jungle herbs too. But it's not as great of Chinese medicine the minute you have this clean land, Chinese medicine, it's worth a lot. But with this, I see, I don't know. We plant it and see if you just let it go with it. Make the immigration migration to Indonesia. But if that's successful. Wow. Preservation. Even your preserved land, you just scare the seed and you just have people harvest to create jobs. Great. Everything. Then we start thinking, well, ecotourism really great. It's beautiful. And then we put a school to learn about ecotourism, because we are designing this as a school where our executives go there for two months to learn, because you don't feel until you do it. So this is some chart, some words. Because we are emotional, emotive people. You have no connection and you learn and you do. You do community you plant. That's a very important for transformation. So then of course you can do supply chain and have cottage industry. All we need to do is do your handicraft. We can design it and we can market. So there are many components. We can develop a complex business model. That's when all if this work I know I'm one of them. Land owner just how much money and palm oil is a five year cycle. That means the minute they go in their works, they can still juice out all the other. And but in in 25 years, the industry can disappear right then. I think the most important thing is structural change in organization. So number one, we are being family business. Andre knows very well the three circle complex relationship conflict thing. But if you take out one circle which is shareholder now, you only have a touch between business and family. The conflict, the thinking, the thinking change. So I said, okay, we put this in the trust. No more shareholders. The family served the purpose and I did the mission called serve the well-being of life while create wealth. So once you restructure your organization, many things can be done. If you don't restructure, it's very difficult. Then we promote we have to be CEO of love Promote Love philanthropy because that's the solution to all problems. The CEO of love.
This is the right panel. Yeah, CEO.
Of love. But you will have a dividend of joy besides your money. There we go. And that is the best medicine for well-being.
All right, I'm moderating that panel next year. Sign me up. We've got just a couple minutes left. I'd love to go down the line. And I want to call to action. What is what is your call to the corporate community on how they can take action on this critical issue? Andre, please, with you.
So to frame it as especially as possible, we shouldn't leave nature to civil society. You know, corporate individuals are individual like any other. I mean, the majority of people who work for us are members of WWF or, you know, and so this idea of saying doing business is about not taking care because I can restore it later for philanthropy. It's just not on. That's finished. We are all in the same planet. We're all swimming in the same pool. If the pool is polluted or if the pool is damaged somewhere, we are all going to suffer. So my call to action be to say, make sure that whatever you do, you make a contribution to one of the three capitals once a day. Be nice to people. Help the old lady to cross the road, cut off the engine, all this sort of thing, but do a small gesture every day, and then we can shift the system. But the very important thing is that we stop talking about conservation. We have to start talking about management, the global commons. And that global commons is not just nature, it's nature also.
Okay. Thank you. Kirsten.
I would say two things. Number one, do no harm. So start with that. You know, forget about all the complicated, you know, investments. But just look at your own investments, your own supply chains and see where you are impacting nature and where it's disappearing. And so I think that's the first one is just do no harm. And the second one, I think very much linked to what I was just saying, is that if you really want to scale, you have to take you have to take an approach to, again, including nature into your decision making. It's not doing. It's not rocket science. It really isn't. It's basic stuff. Where's your investments? Where's your supply chains? How is it impacting forests and nature? And then make sure that you include those things in your decision making processes.
That's exactly what I wanted to say, she said. It's so much better.
Rohini.
I would say I think the business case for nature has already been made. I don't think I think to the corporate sector decision makers, I would say really close your eyes, see the interdependence between everything that you do. You produce, the services you create and the web of life. Go out into nature quietly by yourself. You will come back with the right questions and hopefully the right answers. It should be almost essential. Thank you. Go out there. Come. Come to India. We'll show you tigers. We'll show you just the most magnificent creatures that will make us think. This is the planet that we share. And that. What are my grandchildren going to live with? Think of that.
Thank you. Fred.
Well, you know, wellness is the biggest trend in the corporate. People are in part of the wellness because we don't impact investment ourselves very well in our own wellness. Everybody's stressed out, right? That's the worst thing for health. So wellness is the king. You see, the world is now deconstructing to create a new financial system, a new economic system, a new political system. It's all deconstructing and reconstructing the new world order system. It is happening. Businesses need to transform. They know it. Every business know it. We need to transform. So transform. Take full responsibility and get rid of fear and get more love into it. Because there's no creativity in fear. It's just neutralize and do whatever you're doing. But we can do it together because we cannot succeed. This is a market economy to transform. Economy is like transforming culture. Business must lead the way. But I understand the difficulty. I particularly call on family business, which long term which are more flexible and don't have layer and layer of shareholders of fund manager and bigger fund managers. So I call on we are on the same FBN network, take full responsibility and rock and roll in the impact and you get the dividend of joy.
The dividend of joy. I think that's what we're all looking forward to enjoying this year, especially to our panelists. Thank you all very much. Thank you for our attentive audience.