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Nature is inherently place-based and context-specific. It’s vital that nature strategies are informed by people on the ground, who have spent time getting to know the landscape and who have built trust with key stakeholders.Photo: Whitney Hassett
Sometimes, for a nature strategy to work, the brand needs to get out of the way, agrees Keesee. “Farmers, herders, ranchers and communities are not simply the beneficiaries of the fund; they are the actors driving its strategy. They’re the ones implementing this on the ground, so any of the companies we work with are coming to the table listening and learning. That’s table stakes now.”
Remain open to complexity
Nature is inherently place-based and context-specific. Because of that, it gets hyper-local and hyper-nuanced very quickly, and as such, it requires engaging with multiple stakeholders, some of whom have never sat around the same table before, and might speak totally different languages, literally and figuratively. They’re also probably funded in different ways, with different expectations of how those funds will be managed and how the returns will be measured.
In landscape-level initiatives like the Regenerative Fund for Nature’s project in the Uzumbubu catchment of South Africa, “the fiber or material serves as the catalyst for investment, which brings companies to the table and provides an economic incentive for the local communities”, explains Keesee. “But it’s a much larger conversation that requires engaging companies from other sectors, municipalities, state and national governments, communal herders and farmers and tribal councils. It can get very nuanced, very quickly.”
Despite the complexities, the need for collaboration is clear. “Nobody can pay for resilience by themselves, because it’s too expensive,” says Kolbe Semhoun. “And nobody can make resilience happen by themselves, because there are too many interdependencies.”
