How to make change happen

Swedish Biodiversity Conference – plenary session October 2025

Professor David Hill CBE DL

Founder President, Foundation For Nature

We need to make change happen quickly if we are to avert the catastrophic impacts of

continuing biodiversity loss. That change needs to focus on the wholesale restoration of

nature. This paper outlines key themes that need to be explained to politicians,

business and the public based on experience of biodiversity policy over the past 20

years and opportunities presented by currently nascent environmental markets.

Understanding economic dependency on nature

Since 1970 species population abundance has declined globally by an average of 69%

with a staggering 94% decline evident in wildlife populations of Latin America and the

Caribbean. Biodiversity loss in the UK has been in excess of 60% over the past five

decades with many well monitored groups such as birds exhibiting declines of over

90%. Studies in western Europe have documented a 75% decline in invertebrate

populations, comprising many species which underpin the survival of a vast majority of

higher order species and provide pollination services for our crops. A million or more

species are currently threatened with extinction.

Ethical considerations and intrinsic value alone will not protect existing nor restore lost

biodiversity in the future. Our ‘love’ of wildlife to date, evidenced by the large number of

members of the plethora of nature conservation charities, has not succeeded in

averting massive biodiversity loss in the countryside. Innovations in agriculture and built

development, alongside much greater regulation on sustainability are needed to provide

the space that nature needs to rebuild ecosystem function. New financing mechanisms

and vehicles, such as environmental land management contracts, habitat banks, green

bonds, nature credits and impact investing could provide the funding, so bringing

innovation and finance together is essential in order to deliver the restoration economy

and provide the much-needed transformation in the way our countryside looks and the

wildlife for which it provides a home. But we need a rapid transition in the way nature is

viewed by societies, governments and business.

The statistics on biodiversity and climate are indicators of a catastrophic collapse

facing global economies. The World Economic Forum has calculated that some 55% of

global GDP1 (albeit GDP is recognised as a poor measure of progress) relies to a large

extent on what nature provides such as food, pollination services, freshwater quality

and quantity, air quality regulation, flood-risk management, soil structure, building

materials, erosion control, disease and pest control, medicines and of course climate

regulation. Biodiversity loss is now considered as significant an existential threat to the

human species as is climate change.

It is therefore critical that the impacts from the way we use land and sea, which have

generated such devastating effects on the natural environment, and the substantial

consequences of future losses, are effectively communicated to people across the

world, in a way they can understand, otherwise the essential change needed will not

materialise. Undoubtedly the most significant messaging must focus on the economic

rather than inherent value of nature and natural capital.

Only a relatively small amount of money currently goes directly into biodiversity

conservation - largely from environmental conservation organisations, governments

and philanthropy. In the UK, the Green Finance Institute (GFI) has calculated a finance

gap for effective biodiversity restoration of £4.4 - £9.7bn per year up to 2030, over and

above the c.£750m per year from conservation charities and the public purse.

According to the GFI the data are conclusive that public investment – even if funding

commitments increase – will fall far short of the UK’s nature recovery needs. Private

investment is therefore urgently required in addition to public sector funding if we hope to

transition to a net zero and nature-positive economy. The private sector therefore has to fill

this substantial gap in financing nature because of our critical economic dependency

on it. We need change to effect a major increase in market activity that rebuilds

ecosystems and restores biodiversity; ecological restoration needs to be promoted as

an industry.

Global risks to business and people

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2024 global risks report was based on more than

1,400 experts’ views on the biggest issues facing the world at present and those on the

horizon; the report assesses how big a risk is in terms of the likelihood and severity of its

impact. Some 30% of the experts consulted expect an elevated risk of global

catastrophe within two years, rising to two-thirds of the experts across a decade. Over

the next 10 years the experts see five of the 10 most significant risks as being

environmental (which have massive financial consequences). Four key ones include

extreme weather, critical change to Earth systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem

collapse, followed by natural resource shortages. Increasingly frequent and severe

extreme weather events are ranked as the second-biggest perceived risk for the world in

the near future, key impacts being land degradation through prolonged drought causing

truly massive migration of people from southern Europe and the global south.

We know that businesses change behaviour in association to risk and so the messaging

to effect change needs to have a financial basis rather than an environmental one.

Experts and leaders in the private sector are beginning to realise the severity and

impending extent of these risks and impacts. An analysis by PwC reported by Edie found

that almost half of chief executives believe that their businesses will cease to exist

within a decade without reinvention, with the climate crisis being a major driver of

physical, reputational and competition-related risks. However, very worryingly some

29% of those businesses polled have no plans to act in response to climate-related

risks. The response in relation to biodiversity loss would likely be even more pitiful were

the question asked.

Clearly, the messaging isn’t yet working, and businesses are therefore at increasing risk

of failure unless nature and natural capital use is reduced and restored at scale. And to

do that, corporate business needs to measure, disclose, account for, and reduce its

impacts on nature. Change needs to happen, and happen quickly, if we are to avert the

combined existential threats of climate change and loss of nature advancing rapidly

towards us.

Pressures to change behaviours

It is true, however, that the financial sector is becoming more aware of the dependency

of the global economy on natural capital, though much of the focus is currently on

minimising the individual business risk of exposure to biodiversity reliance rather than

on the criticality of wholesale restoration of ecosystems. In effect, this is a global case

of tragedy of the Commons – we all use nature, but we lack a collective responsibility to

fix the problem wholesale; rather we prefer to focus on the ‘local’ impact of our

activities – why should we pay for someone else’s impacts? At present there is no

collective, aggregated means of contributing to wholesale ecosystem restoration.

The reporting framework of the Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures has

driven behaviour change in relation to climate impacts, through risk evaluation by

banks, ultimately affecting lending conditions to corporate businesses who, as a result,

have largely focussed on carbon – reducing emissions and offsetting residual impacts,

because carbon is considered more ‘fungible’ than biodiversity. However, the business

sector is beginning to turn its attention to biodiversity in advance of any mandate by

governments in implementing the framework for nature (eg. through the Taskforce for

Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, TNFD). Generally, we have good data on global

biodiversity despite some claims that we don’t have enough information on which to

act. But we cannot afford to let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Banks and financial institutions are staffing-up in the area of nature finance and

biodiversity risks and an industry has emerged to support policy development with the

creation of new organisations and coalitions including, for example in the UK (where the

government has established a green finance team), the Green Finance Institute, UK

Business and Biodiversity Forum, the Natural Capital Coalition, Business for Nature, the

Ecological Knowledge Network, and the Nature Positive movement. It is anticipated that

TNFD will provide the route for governments internationally to mandate corporate

reporting on nature and natural capital, thereby stimulating a demand for investment

opportunities in ecological restoration.

Actions which already indicate that a market is emerging include central banks requiring

provincial banks to take account of nature impacts in their lending, standards and

metrics being created with emphasis on key criteria to ensure high quality credits,

investor interest in financing those setting up ecosystem restoration projects, consumer

awareness of the biodiversity crisis driving investor pressure, and environmental NGO

advocacy and government alignment on the need for new economic models headlined

by green finance initiatives.

Whilst at the moment the actual market for biodiversity credits is low, there appears to

be international agreement that the market will escalate quickly by a combination of

investor pressure based on societal demand and stakeholder concerns at risk exposure

(continuing a voluntary market) and an eventual financial reporting and disclosure

mandate (regulatory pressure eg. TNFD driven).

Making change happen – lessons from the UK BNG initiative

Providing the background to the emergence of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) can inform

the generic measures needed to make change happen. The original idea for BNG in the

UK occurred in 2006 when I established the Environment Bank, initially as a means of

lobbying government to introduce biodiversity offsetting into planning law. The planning

system was failing biodiversity because of protracted debate about how to get

developers to mitigate for their impacts. Detailed mitigation plans for developments

failed at the first hurdle – developers didn’t have an appetite for conserving or

enhancing biodiversity, they simply wanted to progress their development in the

shortest possible time at the lowest cost, and planning authorities had no powers or

capacity to enforce failure to effectively account for biodiversity. Biodiversity on

development sites therefore declined – biodiversity conservation and built development

were (and remain) largely incompatible.

BNG was therefore designed as a mechanism to take the biodiversity issue out of the

hands of developers and to give the responsibility to landholders devoted to nature

conservation funded by that development. The BNG policy requires practically all

development to deliver a minimum 10% increase in biodiversity either by constraining

the development to deliver BNG within the site boundary, or to purchase off-site BNG

units from providers who invest in land and restore habitats in order to sell the uplift as

BNG units to satisfy the demand from developers. The idea was that the policy should

be market led; developers would buy biodiversity credits (known as BNG units) in

accordance with market principles.

There were initially many barriers, not least a range of stakeholders who believed that

developers should mitigate their impacts within the development site boundary, and

environmental NGO’s who saw landowners and farmers about to move into their

domain in putting land into nature conservation and being paid for it. The NGO’s made

the term ‘offsetting’ toxic, calling it a ‘licence to trash’ – yet developers had been

trashing biodiversity for many years without being required to protect it or fund its

replacement let alone enhance it. Developers also initially objected, saying that BNG

would be a financial burden, making them uncompetitive, despite residential

developers enjoying around 23% profitability on each house built, (though of course,

development involves not just residential schemes but infrastructure – roads, rail,

water, and commercial – retail, warehousing, distribution centres etc.).

Most of the early years were spent engaging with government officials and Ministers. By

2019 I’d engaged with 15 Ministers of State and five Secretaries of State; political

turnover generated huge inefficiencies and changing government ministers and indeed

governments impacted on priorities. Governments generally suffer from a lack of long-

term vision and an inability to stay the course often because of changing priorities and a

desire to reverse policies of previous governments.

Since 2006 significant confusion around the BNG concept has been caused by many

actors jumping into the space. For example, academics were largely fixated on the

metric, insisting that it wasn’t possible to define biodiversity through one value, and

they had a limited understanding of the need for practical solutions, being more

interested in writing papers on the vagaries of a metric. Policy advocates (government

advisers, officials and NGO’s) saw opportunities to promote their own agendas as part

of BNG. A fixation on the notion that BNG must provide nature immediately next to

where people live, has created perverse outcomes where on-site biodiversity value (ie.

within a development boundary) is extremely limited and the value of BNG in funding

ecological restoration has been curtailed by over-emphasis on on-site rather than off-

site delivery.

Governments play a range of roles that one would hope are designed to ‘make things

happen’, including setting up groups to assess market development, select committees

to hear evidence from stakeholders, and of course mandate policies into law. In 2011

the then Conservative government established the Ecosystem Markets Taskforce

(EMTF) which reported in 2013 with the recommendation that biodiversity offsetting

should be introduced as a mandatory policy on the built development sector and to run

a series of pilots to test how a market would work. As a member of the EMTF and the

Board of Natural England2, I helped set up Natural England’s Developer Industry Group

and Board Innovation Group to refine BNG and to also create a private market solution

for protected species compliance. The biodiversity offset pilots failed to deliver much of

use because of their voluntary nature, but the government, with continued lobbying,

eventually announced, in 2019, that BNG was to be mandated into planning law through

the passing of the Environment Act 2021. This indeed happened but BNG was only

formally implemented in February 2024 in order to give developers and planning

authorities time to accommodate the new law into their business operations. Needless

to say, very few developers or planning authorities spent the two years gearing up for the

change – they waited until the final three months of the implementation period before

attempting to embed BNG into the planning system.

There are therefore a number of actions that made change happen in respect of getting

BNG mandated into law. Persistence in telling the story and showing the way forward

through a solution-focussed plan was key to changing behaviours and taking policy

makers along on the journey. Part of this involved checking and challenging data

presented by others to thwart the initiative. Providing expert evidence at government

select committees (All Party Parliamentary Group on Biodiversity, Environmental Audit

Committee, Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee), and taking up copious

speaking engagements, writing numerous articles across many sectors, and building a

follower base, were all important in building a consensus and a will to change the

system.

Once BNG became mandated into law, Environment Bank needed the funds to scale

the business. I successfully raised the private sector finance (£240m) needed to create

a supply of BNG units through the creation of habitat banks, before demand happened.

The legal mandate changed the model from a nice idea into an investable proposition.

However, despite all of the stakeholder engagement, consultation and design time

spent getting BNG into law as a market-led policy, there are still issues in it operating as

an effective private sector market. The Labour government has recently proposed

exemptions for small development sites (<0.5ha) and the policy preference for

delivering BNG on-site rather than off-site remains, despite the evidence that on-site

BNG fails in almost every case (Hill et al 2025)(3). There is also the threat that BNG could

be scrapped altogether, based on flawed evidence from a very small number of

builders, that it is seen by the development industry as a blocker to growth and instead

developers would be charged a development tax (levy) which would kill the dynamic

private sector nature market. There is no evidence of any levy-based system operating

anywhere in the world – the in lieu fee approach for development mitigation operated in

the United States was abandoned in 2008 as a result of a systemic failure by State

governments in delivering effective compensation for development impacts.

Corporate natural capital accounting and disclosure – a major opportunity for nature

restoration

The BNG model could provide a legacy for a much larger market – the corporate sector,

whose component businesses, as discussed above, rely on natural capital. The UK

could be world leading in the new industry of ecological restoration – restoring the

ecosystems on which we, our businesses and our economy depend. As an example,

the ecological restoration industry in the US, as a result almost solely of compliance

requirements of the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act (and various State-

based wetland preservation Acts), in effect similar to BNG, is worth an annual $25bn

and employs 221,000 people. By comparison, the US steel industry in 2024 was worth

£15.6bn and (in 2025) employs 83,600 people. The size of the steel industry has been

declining for many years. The size of the ecological restoration business has been

increasing significantly year-on-year, and this is in the absence of corporate natural

capital markets (see later). By comparison, the UK steel industry is worth a mere £1.7bn

and supports 37,000 jobs (which seems out of kilter when compared to the US ie over 4

times the number of people employed relative to gross value). By supporting the

development of nature markets such as BNG, corporate natural capital reporting,

nutrient neutrality etc., ecological restoration as an industry in its own right is likely to

be worth far more to GDP and tax revenues than many of the ‘traditional’ avenues of

economic activity.

What might the size of an ecological restoration industry be if a framework similar to

BNG were applied to the corporate sector as a result of natural capital accounting and

disclosure? Evidence shows that BNG costs c. 0.6% of gross development value,

generating a market of potentially £830m – £1,960m/yr in the UK once maturity is

reached and if all BNG is off-site, which of course it isn’t at present. If this ratio cost is

applied to general economic activity in the UK outwith development (UK GDP of

£2.88tn), given the critical dependence of GDP on what nature provides described

earlier, this would generate £15.6bn of funding for nature restoration facilitating the

rebuilding of functioning ecosystems, some two to four times the amount needed to

bridge the nature finance gap.

At present in the UK there is no mandate to require corporate businesses to legally

disclose or report on their dependency or impact on nature and natural capital.

However, the above sums could be leveraged through a financial regulation that

requires corporate businesses to do just that. By disclosing impacts, reducing them at

source through the supply chain and ‘offsetting’ residual impacts by investing in or

purchasing biodiversity units from land providers, substantial funds would be available

to restore nature at scale. It is critical that any mechanism introduced is simple;

government must not interfere with the biodiversity credit market that would likely

develop quickly (eg by applying a levy or tax on corporate business as is now being

proposed for BNG).

Why would corporates do this? For self-interest to a) address severe business risk given

dependency on nature through their supply chains, b) secure better investment terms,

c) to appeal to customers and investors. Laggard companies will fall by the wayside. At

present CEO’s are only just starting to engage with the risks associated with biodiversity

loss and ecosystem collapse (they are taking a short-term view), whereas shareholders

and boards are putting pressure on their executives to derisk businesses against failure

caused by ecosystem collapse (taking the long-term view). One transactional route for

corporate business to achieve a nature positive status would be to invest in, or

purchase, voluntary biodiversity credits from large scale ecosystem restoration projects

that make a formal reporting statement to their shareholders.

In summary, it is critically important that biodiversity loss is halted, and ecosystems

globally restored at scale. Making the change that is needed, happen, will involve far

greater communication, fast-tracking policy development, implementing financial

reporting laws on corporate business, and policy stability that will encourage investors

to invest in ecological restoration as a major business opportunity in its own right. Some

recommendations for specific actions to drive change are given below.

Key recommendations to make change happen

• Create and interpret cross-sectoral data – biodiversity, trends, value to the

  economy, contribution to jobs.

• Effective communication to segregated audiences – keep it simple –

  government, Ministers, officials, stakeholders, landowners/farmers, planning

  authorities, developers, biodiversity unit buyers, corporate businesses,

  regulators.

• Persistence in messaging and challenge of alternative views – nay-sayers.

• Speak at as many events as possible to embed the idea.

• Understand the finance gap – public funding vs private investment.

• Make nature economically visible – money, economic underpinning and jobs

  speak louder that inherent value of nature as embraced by the environmental NGO’s.

• Make it relevant to business risks rather than we need more nature because we

  like wild places….

• Maintain integrity – lobbying position should be to move the dial on nature, not to

  support ones’ vested (financial) interests.

• Run workshops, webinars, publicity events, write papers and articles, develop a

  following.

• Challenge and refine policy documents, respond to consultations.

• Introduce a regulatory framework (financial not environmental) rather than rely on a voluntary approach, because it gives clarity and certainty, speeds up the

  process, enables developers and corporates to operate on a level playing field.

October 2025

1 Global GDP is estimated at $100tn (World Bank figures), and some $44-55tn of that relies on services and resources provided by nature and biodiversity.

2 Natural England is the government’s statutory adviser on nature conservation.

3 Hill, D.A., Pindham, N., Beedell, J., Beamsley, N. & Hindle, R. (2025). The Comparative Value of on-site vs off-site Biodiversity Net Gain for Restoring Nature. July 2025 (www.foundationfornature.org).

4 Report by the Federation of Master Builders ‘The annual house builders survey’ December 2024.

5 Based on a value for the UK construction and development industry of £139bn - £327bn (2022/23).