The Wild Summit 2025 - how to inspire investment in nature

Photo credit - Ania Shrimpton @Wild Summit 2025

Peers for the Planet Chair, Baroness Kathy Willis led a session on investing in nature as part of The Wild Summit 2025 – a major annual conference hosted by LINK aimed at inspiring large-scale investment and action to reverse nature decline.

Baroness Willis’s keynote speech looked at the current financial incentives in place to help reach our 30x30 targets through schemes such as biodiversity net gain, carbon off-setting and sustainable farming incentives. She explained that we will need to protect around 50% more land if we are serious about achieving the target to protect 30% of land for nature by 2030. To do this we will need to look again at current land ownership and what more we can do to incentivise landowners and businesses to protect and restore nature and ensure natural capital assets and nature related risks move up the business agenda and on to risk registers.

For the panel discussion, Baroness Willis was joined by Karen Ellis (Chief Economist, WWF-UK), Kerry ten-Kate (Non-exec Director, Finance Earth), Shaun Spiers (Executive Director, Green Alliance. This session explored how to ensure that polluters pay, including through the development of nature markets in the UK, and considered how current mechanisms can scale up to meet the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.

You can watch the full keynote speech and panel discussion here