On 21 May 2026, around sixty people — asset owners and asset managers, bankers, ecologists, data providers, regulators, city officials and front-line conservationists — gathered at the Edinburgh Futures Institute for the CircHive Investor Hub Stakeholder Day. Hosted by Dr Theodor Cojoianu (University of Edinburgh and Singapore Management University) and Dr Erika Winquist (Natural Resources Institute Finland) and convened by the Horizon Europe CircHive project, the day turned on a single question:
‘How do we move money into nature credibly, and at scale, when nature itself resists the simplification that finance demands?’
Contributors came from across academia (Universities of Edinburgh, Nottingham, Middlesex Oxford, UCD and QUB), business (Raiffeisen Bank, NatWest Group, Space Intelligence, Franklin Templeton, EY), and policy (Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council, IUCN). Between them they set out practical examples, emerging standards, and the areas where collaboration is still needed to unlock meaningful investment in nature.
Three IFB researchers contributed talks: Dr Natalie Duffus presented her research on learning from Biodiveristy Net Gain in England; Dr Hannah Rudman shared hard-won insights into the challenges of making emerging nature markets work for nature restoration project developer, Highlands Rewilding; and Prof Franziska Schrodt reflected on the paradox of drowning in and starving for biodiversity data at the same time.
While both NatWest and Raiffeisen banks highlighted how nature has entered their lending decisions by considering physical risk, much of the day provided a candid reflection of challenges, recent developments, emerging thinking and practice. Three things stood out:
- There is no universal "nature number" — and chasing one is the central mistake. Franklin Templeton's work with the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute found little agreement between different vendors' "biodiversity footprints" of the S&P 500. England's Biodiversity Net Gain metric, the UK's largest biodiversity market, turns out to be a poor proxy for species outcomes. And, as Ed Mitchard (co-founder and Chief Scientist of Space Intelligence) explained, you cannot see biodiversity from space. The productive path is measurement driven by materiality, location and purpose, not a single score.
- Demand — not data — is the binding constraint. Only 6–8% of off-site Biodiversity Net Gain projects have found a buyer, and the voluntary nature-credit market is, as Ivan Paspaldzhiev from EY summarized: "peanuts". Hannah Rudman (IFB and Highlands Rewilding) described restoration projects that are simultaneously too small for compliance buyers and too big for voluntary corporate buyers. The University of Edinburgh’s Craig McKenzie's advice was blunt: start with demand and work backwards.
- Integrity has to be structural rather than aspirational. Nobody in the room wanted to repeat the fate of ESG. The proposals were concrete: conservative crediting with quantified uncertainty; genuine additionality and counterfactuals; federated nature-data registries; and repurposing sustainability-linked loans so that an outcome a bank has already priced becomes an auditable nature credit.
Gabriel Paun, UN Champion of the Earth, closed the day remotely, from a Romanian forest. The economy, he argued, is a sub-system of the biosphere; more than half of global GDP depends on nature; and finance must move...
"from extraction to stewardship, from ownership to responsibility, and from short-term profit to long-term stability."
A detailed summary report will be shared on the CircHive BeeHive.