Welcome to another week of Shaken Not Burned! 

Nature underpins everything – food, water, health, economies – yet when it comes to finance, it’s still often an afterthought. Most people understand that nature has huge value and losing it comes with major risk. However, the dominant ways we fund “nature” struggle to deal with complexity, time and trust.

In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks to Rob Cobbold, founder of B2B nature investment startup Native Squared, about what credible nature finance looks like when you stop prioritising credits and abstractions and start focusing on land, communities and stewardship.

Rob is blunt about what’s broken. Carbon-first and uplift-based models routinely fail the ecosystems most worth protecting. Damaging behaviour can be perversely rewarded because it shows that action is needed: if a forest is being logged, the current system can ensure that funds are directed to that area to avoid logging. At the same time, pristine forests are not legally entitled to funding because it is assumed they don't need protection. Intact rainforests, coral reefs, mangroves – essentially, those ecosystems doing well – often can’t access finance because they aren’t “additional” enough.

The conversation reaches a surreal but revealing point when Rob explains that, in some cases, the most legally robust way to protect a forest may be to buy the logging rights – and then not log it. It seems that it’s easier to use the same legal tools designed for extraction for protection, compared to the systems supposedly built for conservation. It’s hard to think of a clearer illustration of how upside-down current models have become.

Native takes a different route: funding small, mapped pieces of real land or ocean, usually with Indigenous or local communities, tied to long-term stewardship. Buyers aren’t purchasing a tonne of carbon or a promise – they’re supporting the protection of a defined place, with clear governance and long horizons.

Again and again, the conversation comes back to trust. Trust between communities and funders. Trust that protection isn’t just a licence to do harm elsewhere. Trust that money actually reaches the people doing the protecting.

According to Rob, everyone should ask a key question of any nature-based solution: what’s the benefit share? Who actually gets paid, and how much disappears into intermediaries, certification, and bureaucracy?

Financing nature protection is a judgment call. New markets and models are coming, but the real test will be whether they support genuine, long-term stewardship without becoming a substitute for bigger change.

Further reading:

• IPBES warns focus on GDP growth is undermining nature, at 40% collapse - despite businesses relying on nature and ecosystem services

• UK Nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security

• More than half of global GDP is highly dependent on nature

• Johan Eliasch bought 400 hectares of Amazon logging rights

• Greenpeace bids for a coal mine, to shut it down

• Key issues in carbon markets and lessons for biodiversity conservation and financing

• Quantifying Nature Based Carbon Removals in Real-time via Flux Towers 2025

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