EA: As chair of the session “Effectively Implementing Nature as Critical Infrastructure”, what do you see as the biggest gap between where the market currently is and what's needed to make nature-based resilience investable at scale?

JM: The biggest gap is that nature is still often viewed as a "nice to have" environmental outcome rather than essential infrastructure that underpins economic and societal resilience. Until nature recovery is embedded into regulation, funding mechanisms, procurement requirements and infrastructure standards, it will remain difficult to scale investment. The opportunity is to move from treating nature as mitigation for development impacts to recognising it as critical infrastructure that improves the performance, resilience and long-term value of development itself.

EA: You've worked across risk-reporting and natural capital investment at portfolio scale with WSP's nature advisory practice. What tends to trip organisations up when they try to translate nature-based solutions into a business case that stands up to institutional scrutiny?

JM: Not being able to articulate it in terms of business fundamentals – aspects of risk mitigation, effect on the bottom line, and future resilience. The use scenario analysis or stress testing for nature and biodiversity is still nascent but can be a good tool to help translate nature-related risks into concepts that are well understood in the financial and corporate world. Also, for some companies where the risk sits outside of direct operations, sometimes way down the supply chain, the lack of transparency over where products or materials come from is an immediate barrier to being able to articulate the scale or materiality of the risk.

EA: Social and community benefit is often the hardest part of the RoI case for nature-based solutions to pin down. In your opinion, what does "good" look like when it comes to quantifying that value?

JM: We are actually getting much better at quantifying social and community value than many people realise.

Good practice combines economic valuation with evidence of real-world outcomes. We now have established approaches for quantifying benefits such as recreation, health and

wellbeing, flood risk reduction and urban cooling. But equally important is understanding what matters to local communities and involving them early in the design process. The strongest nature-based solutions deliver measurable social benefits while also creating support for development and reducing planning risk.

EA: With input from speakers coming at this from finance, delivery and policy angles, what's the one shift in thinking you most want the Sustainability Delivery Summit London audience to leave your session with?

JM: We don’t have a knowledge gap; we have an implementation gap.

We already understand the benefits, we know where investment can come from and where it is needed, we have the tools to measure outcomes. The current challenge is aligning policy, finance and delivery so that investing in nature becomes the simplest and most obvious decision to make.