The surprising lessons adventure taught this eco-entrepreneur about reflection and effective leadership

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they are tackling the world's toughest challenges.

In today's episode, we talk to Kat Bruce, the founder of Nature Metrics. She's an eco entrepreneur and a former jungle explorer. She'll share how adventure has made her better at adapting, grappling with risks and a better leader.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please don't forget to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum and this is Meet the Leader.

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics I don't think you can spend three months in the middle of the Amazon living with indigenous communities without that sort of fundamentally changing your life.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Kat Bruce is many things. She's an entrepreneur. She founded Nature Metrics, that is one of the world's leading nature technology companies. It measures very tiny traces of DNA that organisms leave behind in the air and the water in the soil as they go about their day.

And it helps monitor ecosystems. This helps governments and NGOs and businesses better understand their economic and environmental impact. It also helps people understand how things like regenerative agriculture are actually changing the land.

But before she was an entrepreneur, she was an explorer. She studied the Amazon from the side of a balsa raft that she made herself. She spent weeks in tiny boats with near strangers, roiled by storms in the Irish Sea. And she'll lead a special rowing expedition this year, the GB Row Challenge, rowing 2,000 miles unassisted in a watercraft specially designed to collect data on everything from microplastics to salinity to sound data to, of course, environmental DNA.

It's those expeditions that have shaped her as a leader. And she'll share how hours in a very small space, or in life or death situations, can go a pretty long way to helping you act fast. We risk and deal with conflict in ways that you have never imagined.

She'll talk about all of that. But first, we'll talk more about environmental DNA and the insight that makes it possible.

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So we analyze the tiny traces of DNA that all organisms are leaving behind in the environment. Now, we know that when we touch something, you leave DNA in a fingerprint. And every organism, from bacteria up to blue whales and monkeys, is leaving a trail of DNA everywhere it goes. And that DNA ends up in the environment. So a huge amount of it ends up in the water, also in the soil and even in the air.

So at NatureMetrics, we take samples of the environment, and we analyze those traces of DNA to turn all of those tiny little traces into amazing quantities of data and information about which species have been in the environment. So we can take just one litre of water from a river or from the ocean, analyze the DNA and tell you everything that's been in that environment recently, from the microbiome up to the sort of charismatic wildlife that we all know and love.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What are some practical ways that that data can be used?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So we work a lot with, for example, businesses that are doing environmental impact assessments. And actually they are already required to have no net loss of biodiversity if they're working in natural habitat. So we work with mining, energy, infrastructure. Doing a lot of work in offshore wind at the moment. We help them to set their baseline -- so to understand what's there at the beginning, to be able to quantify the impact that they have on species and ecosystems and then be able to track their progress and then evaluate success in restoring ecosystems afterwards.

We also work with most of the world's largest international conservation organizations, helping them understand what species are where so they can send their specialist conservation resources straight into the places they know they can have the most impact.

We're doing a lot of work in regenerative agriculture, helping to understand how changes in management of land affects their biodiversity, and building an evidence base so that we can move forward with things like regenerative agriculture and sustainable management.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Give us a sense too of the impact from one of those examples. You know, what kind of a change have you seen possible, or how has this data been really useful to one of these organizations?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics We've seen, for example, with some of the work we've done in the mining industry, we've detected species around sites that hadn't been recorded before, which are protected, and we've seen new species management plans put in place at the landscape level with multi-stakeholders to be able to protect and conserve those species.

We've seen projects in the UK where a baseline of fish biodiversity was used to bring in about 500,000 pounds of funding to conserve the harbor. So we're starting to see our data leading to really tangible results and to organizations being able to bring in funding to, you know, really protect and restore ecosystems.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What is needed to scale an organization like yours, what would be needed to scale it?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So for us, we're actually ready to scale. We've got everything. We've got the, our laboratories are working at scale. We've done projects in over 100 different countries around the world. We've demonstrated the technology. So what we need now is really for the ambition to be realized in terms of businesses, organizations, really putting their money where their mouth is, making changes and being prepared to document that.

We talk a lot about how we can measure things and how difficult it is and what measurements we should use, and we need to actually just get on, start collecting data, start measuring, start showing change so that we can start to drive accountability and make sure that all of the talk that's happening at the moment turns into real actions that drive positive outcomes for nature. Because if we're going to say that an organization is taking steps to help nature or to reduce their negative impacts, or to have a positive impact, that means something somewhere on the ground has to change.

Nature is location based, it's place specific. And so we need to make sure we can document those actual changes and flow that information all the way through the value chain.

So we're ready to do that. We're already working with so many amazing organizations, and we just need that sort of will to be there to to really get on and do it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And what needs to maybe change in an organization. So, say if somebody is listening to this, what's the little thing that can be the light bulb moment for them? What needs to change so that they realize, "oh gosh, we say this and here's what we need to do next to make sure we're moving in the right direction to do all this measurement." What should they change?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So actually one of the biggest problems we see is that people don't realize it's possible to do large-scale measurement on the ground. In the past, it meant having to mobilize really big teams of experts to go onto site and spend a long time there, sort of visually cataloging biodiversity. The technologies that we have now, like eDNA, allow us to generate data routinely at large scales without having to send out big teams. So the sampling kits that we use are so simple that literally a five-year-old can collect a really good quality sample. That means that whether it's onsite contractors or local communities or schoolchildren, you can get all sorts of parts of civil society involved in collecting this data, and it can start to come through at large scales and really track that impact on the ground. So a lot of it is awareness, just that there are tools and technologies out there and that, you know, we need to be brave enough to try some of these. And the organizations that we work with have really found that it is revolutionary in their ability to monitor biodiversity.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader With all this, can you talk a little bit about the actual collection of these samples? You said it's so simple that even a child can do it. Paint a picture for us. What does that look like?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So so I've actually got one of our filters here. We talk about this is a high tech solution because we're generating data at scale, and we're using machine learning and AI to be able to understand ecosystems. But at the ground level, it's really low tech and it's really, really accessible. We wanted this to be something we can put in the hands of anybody, anywhere in the world to collect high quality data on biodiversity.

So this is a really simple disk with a filter membrane inside. And our simplest kit involves just pulling water up from the river, or a lake or an ocean in a big syringe, screwing the syringe onto this filter, pushing the water through and the DNA gets trapped inside the disk. Then you just inject a preservative solution, and that's sent back to our lab. So you don't have to send water around the world. It's literally just these little disk filters. They come back to our lab, and inside here you'll have DNA from across the whole ecosystem. So from the microbiome up to your fish, frogs, bats, jaguars, etc.

And so we can then analyze those DNA traces. It's a process in the laboratory that involves heating up and cooling down and spinning tiny amounts of colorless liquid, and then putting it in a sequencing machine at the end. About 30 million DNA sequences come out of that sequencing machine, and we can match those against known DNA sequences from species to identify them.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That's amazing. Can you talk a little bit about what brought you to this? What was your inspiration for starting Nature Metrics?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics I originally went to study classics at Oxford, so I was studying ancient Greek and Latin and things, and I had a bit of a moment when I realized that that was, almost by definition, not the future.

And I got as far away as I could and sort of found myself partly by accident, in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon. And I spent three months living 100 miles from the nearest road with an indigenous community who wanted to get protection put on their reserve, and doing biodiversity surveys. I don't think you can spend three months in the middle of the Amazon living with indigenous communities without that sort of fundamentally changing your life.

And so I recognized just that almost indescribable richness of life. But at the same time, the virtual impossibility of cataloging it all. There were so many species that we knew were there, but we never, ever saw them. And so for me, when I then started working with these DNA-based tools during my PhD and saw the scale at which we could generate data. So now I could just take a water sample from the Amazon River and out pop all of the species that I spent all of those months trying to see. And that information can feed directly into things like what we were trying to do back in the Amazon, in terms of building that evidence base for protecting really important indigenous reserves.

So that was sort of what made me take the really unexpected leap from field ecology and biodiversity science into starting a technology company, which I never in a million years thought I would do.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What did you need to do to kind of get schooled up in order to run this? I mean, entrepreneurs aren't experts in everything. They have to kind of garner resources and galvanize different experts. What was your process for that?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So I was really lucky to have an opportunity. As I finished my PhD and I knew we wanted to start this company, but I knew I knew nothing about business. Never even worked in a business. I was really lucky to have an opportunity to join as an intern the team that was running a startup accelerator in London. So that gave me a chance over a few months to see all of the different startups and see all the ways that they were raising funding and putting together their pitch decks and their business plans and understanding where the networks of investors were and things. And that gave me a chance then to go out and pitch my own company.

I found a couple of investors who were willing to take a chance on something really different to what they were hearing about sort of day in, day out.

I was asked a lot, who's going to pay for this? Who's going to pay to know about nature? It's not important to anyone with money, surely. So luckily, we were able to point to actually quite a lot of existing regulations that did require nature to be monitored, and that it was really difficult for people. Organizations were spending so much money to get very little usable data. So there was a real obvious gap.

But then since that time, we've just watched the whole world wake up and sort of realize that nature is fundamental to everything. It's fundamental to our global food security, to mitigation of and stability of our climate, to local livelihoods all over the world. If we don't have nature, we don't have a global economy. And if we can't measure it, we can't set goals and targets. We can't link it to finance. We can't make people accountable for actually changing their interactions with nature.

So we don't get asked anymore about who wants to pay for data for nature, because it's one of the big challenges that everybody is grappling with. But it's so exciting to be in this space with a solution that enables data to flow from the ground.

And for me, this is really, really important: to change our relationship with the natural world we have to have radical collaboration between organizations, from ecologists and conservationists and local communities on the ground, up to banks and investors and multinational corporates at the other end.

And these are organizations that have no history of working together. They have no trust between them. They have no common language. You literally say the word taxonomy to an ecologist and a banker, and they run in totally different directions. It means completely different things.

And so the power of being able to generate data on the ground that is meaningful to all of those different organizations through the value chain, gives a common language that they can coalesce around, and you can start building trust.

If we do what we see a lot of, which is that at the top end of sort of, you know, the banks, the finance, the corporates, they want these very simple sort of black box metrics that don't even involve looking at the ground. That's only going to increase the distrust. So we need to have data that flows right from the ground all the way through -- and that through transparency drives accountability and collaboration.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You also lead expeditions in the Amazon. This is incredible to me. Tell us more.

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So after I originally went to Ecuador and sort of had my eyes opened and my life changed by just being in the Amazon, I spent 2 or 3 years going back and forth working in research stations. I did an expedition where we built balsa wood rafts and went down one of the tributaries of the Amazon, going past one of the natural gas projects, which was having huge environmental and social impacts in the area. And I really wanted to just see for myself and be able to sort of tell some of those stories about what the reality is on the ground of those sorts of projects. And that was one of the other things that really galvanized me to spend my life working in this area.

Since then, I don't get a chance to do these sorts of expeditions so much anymore. But I have been combining my work with environmental DNA and my many years of being a competitive rower to do ocean rowing expeditions where we're collecting data on the environment.

So most recently, last year, I rowed around Great Britain in boats that have been adapted to collect microplastics, environmental DNA, sounds data, temperature and salinity. And there are teams that are going every year and working with the University of Portsmouth to collate all of this data, to be able to map the health of our coastal ecosystems around Great Britain.

It's a incredible, just adventure and expedition. I had to learn and draw on all of my skills of being able to work within a team in a pressurized environment, making decisions all the time, but also contributing to something bigger.

So this year, I'm also putting together a team of all women who work in nature and climate. And we are going to do the same thing again. But we're going to as well as collecting the data, we're going to tell the stories of all of the amazing coastal restoration and regeneration projects that are going on around our coastline.

Because one of the amazing things about nature is it has this incredible ability to bounce back and to recover, given a chance. So actually with really small amounts of investment we can make a huge difference and you can make that difference within like a really visible time frame. So you can see nature coming back. And I think it's something that gives us hope within our community that, yes, we talk about the problems, but also there are so many solutions out there, and there are people already doing this and showing that it can be done. And we do have an opportunity to turn things around.

So through this expedition, I really want to sort of bring that to life and talk about, yes, the challenges and threats, but also the things that we can do to make a difference.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And how have these expeditions changed you as a leader?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So the expedition that I did last year with the ocean rowing around Great Britain was a really interesting point for me and my organization. I was not the CEO anymore, and I was wondering exactly what my value was within the organization.

And when I went off on the trip, I thought that perhaps I would want to use that to transition maybe into something else and out of the company. So I spent a month at sea in a completely different environment, having to work together in a very, very small space with people I didn't know particularly well, in an environment which is potentially dangerous. We ended up in big storms in the Irish Sea, and there are, you know, a lot of incomplete information. And you have to work together. You have to go through those difficult times where you have to hear other people's views, and then you have to actually make a decision and do it and do it together and commit to it. So that was amazing to do in a completely different context from my work life.

When I came back, I actually found that I was able to walk back into the business and re-engage with it in a completely different way, with a lot more confidence, not shying away from difficult conversations, from environments where there's a little bit of conflict, but actually able to walk into those and come out productively and not nearly as emotionally as I used to.

And that's completely transformed my relationship with my board, with my executive team, with the team that I work with throughout the business.

And I never would have realized that. People say, go and do adventures. It helps you, you know, in your work life. And I always thought that was an excuse just to go and do adventures. But it's not. It's genuinely transformative. So I would say if anybody, you know, if you ever have an opportunity to do something like this, do it because you get so much from it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Was there a moment on that expedition where you just thought, I don't know how we're going to fix this. I don't know how we're going to move forward. You get through it. Right? But you kind of hit this little wall. Was there a moment like that?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So that was one moment coming just on the northeast coast of Scotland. So we'd gone all the way round up the west coast along the top of Scotland, turned to come back down. And it's the middle of summer. So there's very little darkness. But somehow whenever anything goes wrong, it's in that small period of darkness. So we were coming across the Moray Firth and we'd underestimated the strength of the tide around the next headland, and the wind was stronger than it should have been. So suddenly we realized we weren't going to be able to get around the headland, and we were going to be blown out into the North Sea.

We had a closing window of opportunity to be able to turn around and go back down the coast and, and find shelter, and it was just one of those moments where you've got to make a decision fast. The weather's bad. Three of you are rowing really hard just to try and stay still. It's windy and loud and you're trying to shout from opposite end of the boat. It's really tense in those moments.

Actually, we'd had a situation before where we'd realized that this was a problem for us, that we had some people who enjoyed the risk more than others and who had louder voices. And so we'd taken the decision to amplify and give somebody the responsibility for speaking up for the most conservative voice in the boat, and that if there was difference of opinion, that that would be the voice that won out. So that was a time where we first put that into action and that voice was raised and we said, no, we're turning round now, and we're going to go back down the coast and seek shelter. And we did. And it was, it was fine.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That's amazing. Is there something that anyone listening to this can take from that example, of how do we kind of get through a thorny moment? Time is always going to be short. We always need to kind of, you know, work quickly. Is there something anybody can take from that if they're kind of like trying to balance competing needs?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics Yes, I think it's actually about being very reflective.

I think because we've been through some of these situations before or situations where we realized that we had these sort of imbalances and we've been able to talk about it, to assess it and think, okay, what can we put in place to counteract this so that when we're next in the situation,we know how to deal with it so that we don't end up with a big conflict or something that would spiral into a dangerous situation.

So I think the importance of working with teams, working out who you are as a team, your different personalities, your different strengths and weaknesses. And then, for that particular team, what it is that you need to put in place in order to function effectively in difficult times is just as such an important investment early on.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader In your mind, what is your goal for 2024?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics So many goals for this coming year!

I think in terms of Nature Metrics, we're looking to really scale up what we're doing. So we're working with a huge number of organizations around the world. We're launching our digital platform in a couple of weeks time, and that's going to allow our customers to be able to view trends over time, combine data set, interact with their data, compare data from different times and places. And so we're looking to really start sort of getting involved in these really long term monitoring programmes and and whole portfolios of projects around the world.

We're going to be raising a series B funding round this time next year. So we're sort of putting everything in place for that. We're looking for really mission-aligned investors who want to be sort of at the leading edge of the biodiversity technology space, because we've got an amazing opportunity to build something really, really exciting, both from a commercial and an impact perspective.

And then for me as well, this expedition that I'm putting together to row around Great Britain with the team of women who work in nature and climate, is one of my big personal ambitions this year, and I want to make sure that we put the time and effort and planning into it to be able to really make the most of the opportunities, tell the stories of everything that we're going to go past around our coast next year.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Working for the climate means thinking in the long term and having a lot of patience. How do you keep motivated?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics I don't actually have any problem with motivation. I think that's probably true of everybody who's working in the nature space, because I think we have this amazing combination at the moment of real urgency of visibility that we didn't have before, an opportunity to do things at scale that the conservation community has wanted to do for years and years. And suddenly there is engagement of all of the different stakeholders that are needed, and there's money coming in, and it's on us to figure out what to do with it and make sure that that money is used really effectively to have the biggest possible impact. It's a community of amazing people.

So coming to events like New York Climate Week, like the COPs. Even our office in Nature Metrics is just full of people who are there because they want to do their piece to create the world that we want to live in, or that we're able to live in. There's an incredible sort of energy around that. So I leave weeks feeling so fired up and energized and motivated to go home and do everything that we can do to make sure that our work accelerates our impact as much as possible.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Is there something everyone's going be talking about? Action we need to implement right now? What should people prioritize? Because clearly some stuff still very much needs to move forward and isn't. What should people be prioritizing to make sure that this urgent action takes place?

Kat Bruce, NatureMetrics There are so many parts of this puzzle. The biggest thing is actually bringing it all together. So it's partnerships, it's the collaboration, it's learning all of the different languages. So like I said, you take conservationists and banks, we don't speak the same language. We need to learn bits of each other's language so that we can join up the dots and we can enable finance to flow down to the ground.

We need to break down the silos. We need to innovate in the ways that we're able to work together.

We need to just start taking action everywhere that we can. We won't get anywhere by sitting around and talking about what's difficult or what we could do, what we maybe should do. We actually get somewhere by trying things and having a go at some of it will work and some of it won't work. We'll be able to move forward where we can. So take actions, find the win wins.

The thing about nature as well is that through investing in nature and working with nature, we're not just solving, you know, biodiversity and creating a nice world for all the species to live in. We're creating sustainable local livelihoods for people all over the world. We're contributing to mitigation and adaptation of climate change. We're contributing to the ability to feed the world. This is addressing so many of the SDGs through investment in nature is an incredibly efficient way to have an impact across everything. So we need to work together. We need to move forwards on all fronts and we need to create common languages.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That was Kat Bruce, thanks so much to her. And thanks so much to you for listening.

Find a transcript of this episode, as well as transcripts from my colleague's podcast, Radio Davos, at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me, with Jere Johansson as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.