Healthy landscapes and seascapes need more than finance

The landscapes and seascapes that sustain us do not belong to one person, sector or generation. They are shared foundations of our economies, societies and our wellbeing. Yet we often treat them as commodities or parts, maximising value for one sector or group rather than stewarding the whole.

Over time, we degrade the quality of the system, to the detriment of all.

The challenge is not simply to find more finance for nature to conserve what we have and restore degraded systems but to redesign the incentives, institutions and relationships that determine where finance flows and what it rewards.

Our incentives currently point in the wrong direction.

The UN Environment Programme estimates that $7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities in 2023 – from environmentally harmful subsidies to investment in high-impact sectors. Meanwhile, only about $220 billion supported nature-based solutions.

For every dollar invested in protecting nature, roughly $30 are spent degrading it. Repurposing even a fraction of these flows would transform the outlook for both landscapes and seascapes.

By assessing incentives and harmonizing the needs of different actors in the same geography, new models are emerging for the conservation, restoration, stewardship and resilience of nature. These involve active engagement with industry to build awareness and drive action to reduce unintended side effects of economic activities, particularly when externalities are not priced in.

They also include tighter policies such as the World Trade Organisation Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, which entered into force in 2025 and eliminates a substantial portion of the $22 billion in harmful subsidies paid out each year to deplete fish stocks.

In addition to addressing negative incentives, we can create positive incentives for nature conservation and restoration.

Payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes can help build environmental infrastructure while generating social co-benefits. Mexico’s nationwide programme pays communities to conserve forests and watersheds, increasing forest-management activities by 48%, reducing tree-cover loss by 29% in high-risk areas, and strengthening community social capital and water security.

Other models seek to redirect investment at scale. Brazil’s Eco Invest programme uses public risk-sharing and blended finance to lower the cost of capital for activities compatible with conservation, including sustainable agriculture, degraded-land recovery and the bioeconomy.

Private-sector pay-for-success contracts and long-term offtake agreements offer additional ways to link finance to verified environmental outcomes, while rewarding land managers and communities for a healthy ecosystem and their services.

Too often we think in fragments. A forest is reduced to a source of timber or a sink for carbon. A farmer or a fisherman becomes a producer in a supply chain. The reef is a tourist destination. A company is judged by its short-term financial returns.

In reality, these actors are part of deeply interconnected systems, where natural, social, human and economic value are inseparable. Our health, livelihoods and resilience are increasingly shaped not by individual outcomes alone but by the wellbeing of the systems we share.

Indigenous Peoples have long understood this principle. In many Indigenous contexts, direct income payments alone may not reflect community priorities or cultural values.

More appropriate forms of finance may include recognizing water basins from mountains to the ocean as an integrated system to manage, clarifying land rights, strengthening Indigenous-led governance and supporting stewardship according to locally defined priorities, guided by elders who know their ancestry and the landscape.

Organizations such as the Earth Elders bring these perspectives into dialogue with global decision-makers, advocating for a world where humans and all life can flourish together.

By embedding Indigenous knowledge into governance and financing frameworks for conservation and restoration, systemic thinking offers dividends for all.

Across the Pacific Islands, communities have governed the sea collectively for centuries through customary closures – tabu in Fiji, ra’ui in the Cook Islands – decided together by communities and their leaders, and enforced through customary authority and trained local wardens.

In Fiji, this tradition underpins a national network of locally managed marine areas spanning more than 400 communities and over a fifth of inshore fishing grounds; in Ucunivanua, a community-declared tabu restored collapsing clam populations so convincingly that villagers extended the closure indefinitely.

The insight is not only ecological but institutional: when the people who depend on a resource decide its rules together – and hold the authority to enforce them – protection becomes self-interest rather than sacrifice.

New frameworks such as Marine Prosperity Areas now build on this logic, pairing area-based protection with deliberate investment in community well-being during ecological recovery.

Collaboration is the mechanism that changes what capital rewards: trust built across sectors lowers the perceived risk of long-term investments in nature, shared governance lengthens time horizons beyond quarterly returns and coalitions aggregate dispersed local efforts into portfolios of investable scale.

As we face Earth’s sixth mass extinction, humility about our vulnerability and genuine partnerships are needed to support financing systems and mindsets that optimize for higher-order objectives.

At One Impact Week in Singapore, constituents from East and West are coming together to discuss opportunities for greater collaboration to be “at one” with ourselves and nature.

The World Economic Forum and NO. 17 Foundation are advancing stewardship across interconnected Earth systems, mobilizing leadership, innovation and capital for regeneration and enabling collaboration for long-term systems change.

Two large-scale efforts already show this in practice. The African Union’s Great Green Wall brings together 22 governments across the Sahel around a goal to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. It has already restored 20 million hectares and created 350,000 jobs (by 2023), with progress strongest where communities feel ownership of the work.

At sea, the Great Blue Wall applies a similar collaborative logic across the Western Indian Ocean, supporting more than 83,000 square kilometres of marine and coastal areas and over 112,000 livelihoods in its first five years.

Neither is a story of linear progress, yet both illustrate how shared structures can sustain collective action through setbacks and changing conditions.

If we believe that collaboration can work and dedicate our time and attention to create and innovate towards the common good, human ingenuity could unlock significant dividends for people and the planet.

Through international cooperation, the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling helped create the conditions for the recovery of several whale populations, including humpbacks.

In Costa Rica, forest finance is increasingly linked to independently verified emissions reductions and benefit-sharing, connecting international capital with national institutions and local priorities.

These examples remind us that collective action can change the trajectory of shared natural systems when we align incentives, institutions and interests around long-term outcomes. What we inherit together, we can learn to steward together.