R4N Episode 12: Justin Adams, Ostara

[Music] Hi, I'm Helen Avery with the Green Finance Institute and you're listening to Financing Nature. For our final episode of this series, I'm delighted to be joined by Justin Adams, co-founder of the Astora Collective, and fellow with the Circular Bio- Economy Alliance to pose a few big questions about what next for Nature Finance? We spend all of this time saying, "How do we invest more? How do we scale more? How do we find more instruments, more opportunities, more policy mechanisms to do that?" And it's so important, so valuable to do that. But what we are ignoring is the iceberg of this. This is what we see on the surface because underneath it is 7.3 trillion, which I think is probably an underestimate of nature and negative activities. So for all of our work, we continue to ignore the fact that we can work ever harder, we can become busier and busier and busier, and yet the mainstream economy continues to extract and exploit and degrade our environment. [Music] Hello, and welcome back to the very last episode of this season of Financing Nature, the revenues for Nature season. And it is my very last episode of Financing Nature, but I'll share more about that at the end. I'm so excited, however, to wrap up this season with Justin Adams. Justin has been a huge inspiration for me personally, at encouraging us to question, "Is what we're doing in Nature Finance enough?" We're all working so hard. There are just incredible and essential initiatives happening, many of which we've heard about through this season and the other seasons. And it's clear that progress is being made, but we also know that we're continuing to lose by diversity. Populations are growing with ever greater needs to be met. So in these final two episodes, as I said last week, we're sort of departing from the very practical examples of Nature Finance to kind of step back and take a bit of a different view. So Harvey last week posed some bold ideas, many of which still fit within the system that we're in. But today, Justin is joining us to sort of talk about, actually, do we need to question more the system we're in? And are there some changes we need to make sort of fundamentally? And if so, where can that change happen? It's a journey he himself has been working through for multiple decades, actually, has been in the field and then he took a break to explore what would make an even bigger difference. And he's kindly going to join us today to share what he's been learning and what he's working on. [Music] Welcome, Justin. It's so lovely to see you. How are you, first of all? I'm great, sunshineing and yeah, lovely to see you, Helen. It's lovely to see you. So before, well, actually, before we sort of talk about the meat of, you know, how we're going to tackle Nature Finance and all the amazing things you're working on, there'd be really great for everyone to hear your own personal story because I know that it's personally really inspired me, the journey that you've taken through working in Nature Finance and then to where you are now working on several different projects. So I wondered if you would do us the honour of sort of sharing a bit more about that. Let me do that succinctly. I think there's two threads to it. One is the sort of thread that you can read on my LinkedIn profile of my professional journey when I did my first Nature Finance deal 20 years ago now. I'll carbon deal and herited at that point. I was working in BP at all places, but working on the carbon cycle and really trying to understand the role nature my play and inherited the Noel Kemp project, which was at that point, the prototype red project in Bolivia that taught us so much around avoided deforestation and the more I did with that, the more I sort of realised that this was the sort of deeper calling for me that and I then chose to focus my career from 2010 onwards really into the sort of nature and land use space and had various stints and roles, helping set up a fund with the World Bank, moving to a wonderful role at the Nature Conservancy for five years, then the World Economic Forum where I set up the Nature Platform. And then finally into generation investment management, one of the most extraordinary investment firms that's really been pushing the boundary of sustainable finance for 20 odd years and there helped sort of build the strategy for what is now their nature and food fund. But through that journey, I was sort of looking where and how do we make a difference with nature finance, where and how can we really start to address the the desperate situation that we are in and I think everybody listening to this podcast understands the state of nature and the WWF's living planet report that shows the sort of 73% sort of reduction in species abundance in in our lifetimes in 50 years. And that that, you know, as much as the climate crisis sort of really imparels the future of life on earth and so how and where do we find levers to do that. But the second thread of that journey has been one that has always been inspired by nature. I was very lucky in my early 20s to study with some Indigenous elders and they taught me and encouraged me to be listening to nature herself to find ways of finding my path and what my contribution might be and so that deeper in a journey has been a thread that's not in my LinkedIn profile but has been just as important as that professional journey and I'm sure we'll touch on bits of that as we move along. Yeah, I know I'd absolutely love to. So after sort of incredible work on the ground looking at nature finance, you then decided to kind of take a year out. If that's correct and you've come back sort of refreshed with some different views of some different approaches that we should and could be taking. So I'd love if you can sort of share this about that and then sort of leading on to what you're working on now. I mean, I think it's fair to say I sort of very much been an insight. I sort of worked inside the system. Those various roles I touched on a moment ago that believing that we needed to work in the system. We needed to influence the sort of people with power to affect the system and the system could change and I believe that's what a lot of the sustainability world, the sustainability communities worked on for so, so many years and you know we've made wonderful progress the level of awareness that's there now and if you just look at the nature finance agenda. I mean, what's happening with disclosure? I mean, just listening back to Emily McKenzie's wonderful podcast interview with you a few months ago with TNFDs were listening to so many of the kind of other wonderful examples you've pulled in from Terasos and lens and RIMBA collective on the revenues for nature project. It's wonderful seeing how much progress is there and that's yeah, I can give you various examples of things I've done and say yes, that was great. We've made this progress but the dawning realization and again this is actually also the dawning realization from spending deeper time in nature as well was like for all of that progress. We are falling so far short of what is needed because we keep trying to finance regeneration but within a system that is fundamentally built on extraction and unless we start to get to the deeper design traits of the system. Then I worry we will continue to fall short and so here I was just after my 50th birthday and I reached a moment where I realized the most dangerous idea we haven't sustainability is that we don't have time to change the system or redesign the system because I think unless we start getting serious about that we are just stacking more and more problems for future generations to deal with. So how can I with all the privilege the networks the experience I've got actually start to try and say what might we do differently not to say anything or all the progress is bad it's great it's wonderful it's wonderful seeing how many people are engaged but we've got to start pushing for deeper change deeper transformation. Oh gosh makes my heart explode I'm just so refreshing and I'm so grateful for you for having that sort of experience and sort of awakening if you will that's led you to where you are now because I think it's when I look out I see there's quite a few people who are now similarly sort of following in your footsteps and thinking we are so productive across nature finance now so many people being very busy doing wonderful wonderful things but I think it's not going to be a lot of work. So I think it's a lot of work for wonderful things but as you say like is it really changing the system I think quite a few of us are questioning and that's really what we wanted to sort of end this series with was sort of hearing some of the sort of more provocative big ideas that can go a level deeper than where we are at the moment that can really have that long term system change. So this was on to like it would be great to hear what you're working on now I know you've got several hats and angles that you're working here. So yeah tell us all about that. I think there's lots of career paths, lots of opportunities, lots of jobs now in nature finance that are quite clearly marked out. When you say, "Actually, I want to really fundamentally challenge the premise of the system," it's actually far harder to find jobs that do that. One of the things, lots of people say, "Oh, well, what opportunities are there?" "How can we do this?" It's hard. We're breaking new ground, but I'm very fortunate in having a couple of different hats I am wearing. I worked with Circular Bio-Economy Alliance where I became their reimagining nature finance fellow, which is really trying to push the boundaries of nature finance and how we might think. The other organization I set up, which was to actually try and create spaces, opportunities for more people within the system to step back and have immersive experiences in nature to think differently about the future. That's an organization called Astara. Reimagining nature finance should start off with what you observed over your career and then what came to you on your time out. It has come to you since that you see as not working specifically. We can talk about what is working, what could work. I think we know what's got to stop working. We're all scrambling. We're all super busy as you said a moment ago in trying to find solutions. I think one of the things I observed and I helped her offer the first edition of UNEPFI State of Finance for Nature report. I think that was in 2021, the first version that I came out. Of course, the latest edition of that came out a few months ago. The numbers aren't drastically different, but what the latest report shows is that we've got $220 billion of funding a year going into so-called "nature positive investment," which sounds a great deal of money, but of course, in terms of the global economy, it's a rounding era. We talk about the need to scale that nature finance. We're trying to find more voluntary investment from corporates. We're trying to get more regulated instruments for biodiversity markets or for carbon or for other forms of environmental payments. What the UNEPFI latest report says is by 2030, we need to scale it to $571 billion, roughly two and a half times. Scale up. I think we spend so much of our time in terms of the investment side. We spend all of this time saying, how do we invest more? We find more instruments, more opportunities, more policy mechanisms to do that. It's so important, so valuable to do that. What we are ignoring is the iceberg of this. This is what we see on the surface because underneath it is 7.3 trillion, which I think is probably an underestimate, but we see 7.3 trillion of nature negative activities. For all of our work within the nature finance community, which is mostly the bubble we exist in and what we're talking to ourselves about, we continue to ignore the fact that we can work ever harder, we can become busier and busier and busier, and yet the mainstream economy continues to extract and exploit and degrade our environment and many people associated with that. That's the fundamental challenge. I say it's not simply a capital shortage. It's a systemic flaw for all of our efforts to try and upscale and find and get environment ministries to create new mechanisms. Those mechanisms, if you and you work very closely with the UK government and other governments around their own green finance. Again, there's many, many extraordinary wonderful people doing this work. But almost all of our thinking is all driven through market logic. The market logic is the logic of neoliberalism. If we could just find ways of pricing this, if we just find ways of creating a market, private sector money is going to flood in and that's going to solve our problem. Yet, that's exactly the root of the challenges that have driven the degradation. I had an indigenous elder and extraordinary man, now well into his 90s, Orrin Lyons, who's the Onodaga nation from Upper State, New York, part of the Haudenosaunee nation. He sat around this council fire. We had the LH Conservancy's leadership sitting in council for three days with the Haudenosaunee elders. He looked at me and said, "You keep talking about these finance mechanisms. You keep talking about new technology." Yet, that is the very same instinct that has driven so much of this destruction that we have seen over the last 500 years. We're using the same logic to try and solve the problems of the system. That is what concerns me very greatly if we're fundamentally looking to try and shift. There's a couple of things lately I've heard in the UK that have really made me sort of think about this issue of we're just spent with the trillions going into destroying nature. That's not his aim, it's just the system, as you say. One was, I was an Anthropy and a woman from GCHQ, the Intelligence Unit, just reminding us how much is being spent on war and the damage that that does to the environment. It just wipes out decades of any sort of regenerative investment you may have made in land in some of the region, which is war-torn. The other was, there was a discussion around the just because we're in a world now which has slightly shifted in the last almost more decades, probably more than that, having more conflicts with the West involved, I would say. That economic growth must keep churning to pay for defence budgets. Then when I heard that, I thought, "How are we ever going to get out of this more and more extraction to pay for military, which will cause more devastation and then more need more extraction?" You sort of realised it's never-ending. The other thing I'd mention, and I think you said that you'd seen this as well, was that drama, theisation of the water sector issues in the UK dirty business, where you could see very clearly that for all the amazing grants that are put into cleaning up our rivers, means nothing if the water companies are illegally pumping out sewage into our waterways. We just can't fight it. I think there's quite a few people at the moment who are really questioning this is that point you said around how can we ever fight against all the negative impacts that are almost like a byproduct of the system that we live in. I'm keen to hear how are you approaching changing that? A lot of people talk about system change, and I don't know about you, but in the past I've rolled a little bit because I thought, "Well, we're in a capitalist system, you've got to live with it." It's only now I'm starting to think, actually, inspired by people like yourself, like it's time to challenge it, but it also doesn't feel very practical when we talk about system change. I'd love to hear what are you thinking about the actual changes to be made? I mean, we're talking at a time of heightened geopolitical conflict. We're talking at a time of increasing ecological unraveling and a water crisis that in certain regions is just starting to escalate and escalate. We're talking at this time of deep inequality, deep unhappiness with our political system. Yet so many people empower your example of the lady from GCHQ, and we see it in the 24-hour new cycle we're all bombarded with. We're just stuck within this system that we don't have any alternative. We've got to increase defense budget. We can't regulate the water company's more because then they won't be able to just keep the function of water delivery to our homes and our businesses. We're stuck within this logic, even though more and more people are realizing goodness, things are not working well. For many people, they're working fine for a few people, but for the majority of people, and certainly for the majority of species, this system is not working well. So I would say when I step back and again, what a privilege to have that opportunity to take a year to step back and just reflect on what the heck am I doing and where the heck are we? I realize that we have this crisis of separation. We've separated ourselves from each other and from the natural world. We've got this crisis of individualism and crisis of meaning because we've separated ourselves so much and I have young adult children who talk about this isolation that so many young people are feeling as well, this dislocation of where are they at this moment. So I think this crisis of separation and then this other thing is this crisis of imagination that we struggle to see beyond the boundary of the system that we're in. the number of times that I end up in circular discussions of like you're kidding yourself. If you think we're going to change the system, you're kidding yourself. This is what it is. So let's just put your head down, get on with it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. Then what's the answer? Will the challenge with a new system is it's hard to see, it's hard to analyze. I got in trouble the other week because I quit. It's not going to be a McKinsey report that helps us just analyze our way into this, which is a sort of which is not so much a comment on McKinsey, but a comment on the logic of our current system. We can't imagine that. So I look for inspiration from kind of other world views, other ways of thinking about seeing the world. You've got these deep spiritual traditions around the world, but we've also got particularly in the nature world indigenous traditions who have maintained deep relationship and a deep understanding that we are not separate, that we are completely interrelated. We are one part of this living extraordinary tapestry of life, this one living world. So I have taken great inspiration from indigenous principles, indigenous ways of understanding and relating to the world and what that might mean in terms of alternative. So that's an area that we could sort of tap into a little bit in terms of where some of those opportunities might be of an alternate system. I have taken inspiration from some of the emerging experiments on the fringes of technology and what technology is enabling in terms of decentralized distributed finance mechanisms that are happening in a very, very small way that in some ways might build on the microfinance experiments of recent decades and enable things to happen at a much more local level. I've taken great inspiration from some of the teachings of Buddhism and the teachings of interbeing and sort of how that may relate to different ways of working. I take great inspiration from the rights of nature movement and how in giving rights to nature and I spent time in New Zealand with the Thanganoi River and the idea that a river might have rights. What does that mean in the context of a culture like the UK where we privatised hot water but now we're seeing some of our own riverways, the river Y and others that are starting and have a river guardians and people who are speaking for the river and the species of the river. What does that start to kind of open up in terms of new possibilities? So I just use those as little examples of sort of seeds of what a future might be as difficult as it is to conceive because the last thing I would say I think we suffer from this tyranny of scale, right? That in our existing system, finance only matters if we're going to start talking about 100 billion or one of the things I realised when I was a generation as we were building this nature and food fund and it's again it's going to do some fabulous things. This is not a critique of the fund. I'm so excited for that team and what they're starting to do but understanding that the smallest check size we would want to write as an investor might be 25, 30 and ideally 50 million dollars, right? And you think what actually are the needs of nature? What are the needs of community because inherently so much of this work is local but we're operating in a homogenised global financial system that just wants scale and so unless it's at that scale we ignore it. So I think the tyranny of scale is something we need to break if we are going to actually start to align to what nature's principles might be and what nature finance may be nudging us towards. So, gosh, there's a lot in there and have multiple questions. This tyranny of scale, I love that. I hope you T.M. that. But I was thinking about the seashells. I can't remember if it was the depth of nature swap early on or a blue bond but I remember it was a journalist at the time and I commissioned my colleague to go there and write the story. Obviously we were hoping to say what a new normal success it was and one of the biggest things she came back and said was that the money was actually too much. It was a country of about about 94,000 I think and the money from the blue bond to support action was 15 million dollars which was too much that could be put to use really. So some projects needed more like 35,000 I seem to remember some perhaps even less. Not to mention that it was also a country that had some challenges, there was some corruption but also 10% of the working population had a heroin addiction problem at that time and that kind of money actually you can cause more problems. So the solution for the seashells wasn't necessarily large amounts of money for conservation actually some of the fishermen needed a much smaller amounts that they could could put to work. It was a long time ago that we wrote the article so I don't know what happened since and hopefully it has been a huge success and all those challenges behind out but it really stayed with me to your point on scale mismatch. But I have a couple of questions. One was so do you think this calls for different financial institutions? Is that something you're exploring? I'm not exploring new financial institutions at this point. I think inevitably it does but we've also got to work with the institutions. We're going to slide this whole question of transition and transformation and how do we get there? I think it does require for new financial instruments and instruments that are enabling exactly as you just described. So many of these communities places require us far smaller amounts of capital than our existing system is going to work. So how can we actually get decentralized finance working? Because of the risk return dynamics of what drives large scale financial investments, anything that is small scale immediately just flags up as too risky. You can speak to Folk and Sub-Saharan Africa and some of the analysis has been done there. Almost any African country counts as too risky. So without existing logic we can't finance so much of this. And there's a whole emerging movement around regenerative finance which is still small scale but it has the potential for how we can then distribute finance at a much more localized decentralized distributed scale. And I'm really interested in that. I'm really interested in some of the mechanisms of that. And I think fundamentally what I'm trying to start to sort of set up and look at some of the case studies and prototypes for is how might we bridge the relative sophistication from a Western perspective of financing into what some of those more decentralized localized regenerative models might be. I've just returned from the Andes fabulous project they're called Action and Dina that won the Urshop prize in 2023. Amazing leadership between an organization called Global Forest Generation and Echo and that is linking the conservation restoration of the high water towers of the Andes to kind of how do we get Nature Finance to work. And we're starting to think what new mechanisms might be needed because the magic of what they're doing is they're working with now 180 communities across I think five six countries of the Andes and getting money to them. It's still based on grant mechanisms. It's still clunky kind of how do you get the money to work, how do you get it to flow, but how do you give real decision rights and real governance to some of those communities themselves. If you can start to use some of these new technologies that enable that and then you can start to link that to actually how many companies industries are dependent on water from those mountains so that you can start to recognize this is a collective risk issue that countries companies industries have got that starts to say there's new ways that we're going to need to unlock this and start to think of you know this is a current old economy term but but nature as infrastructure for the absolute fundamental security of those communities and those countries because water is life right there's ways that we could start to think about finance to work in a different way. So that's the type of opportunity I'm really excited to be developing so that we can actually build regenerative principles into that and start to come into a very different type of financing future than the one we currently got available that is either pure philanthropy or we're going to have to create some large company that that you know is going to manage all of this and have double digits returns double digit returns and and then we've got to have kind of you know MBAs from Harvard and you know Stanford that are going to come in and need to run it and need to write a slide we've got to get smarter around how this is going to work versus just sort of replicating the bits of the system that we know a perpetuating business as usual. So again so many questions but one thing I wanted to hear from you is one some more examples I think that's always so helpful if you've seen examples where where things are working or for a sort of alternative but I know you and I have talked in the past about this disconnect of the short termism of finance versus like the the long term efforts that we need to be taking really if we're thinking sort of decades down the line of future generations for the environment. So a couple of themes there but I just wondered if you sort of have other examples you wanted to talk about maybe reflect on that governance or long-term thinking. Yeah I think as we step back and I co-authored a report a few months ago called reimagining nature finance and there we touched on the kind of the deep design principles of the finance system as we have it and let's remember that that finance system is a finance system that has evolved in particular over recent decades maybe over centuries and at most a couple of thousand years old but nature herself has evolved over hundreds of millions of years and yet the finance system particularly this sort of hyper accelerated neoliberal finance system that we've got is incredibly short term in focus. It is point based and reductive it is disembodied from place right and you can just see the examples time and time again yeah and my father's side you know is from the the south Wales valleys and you see capitalism that sort of came through and and there was a brief sort of flourishing for a hundred years and then capitalism moves on and the environmental devastation and social devastation you know continues a century on right and you see time and time again examples of sort of how the finance system just moves on it doesn't it's not connected to place and finance is inherently accumulative it wants to just keep growing this idea of perpetual growth which I think is so problematic where nature recognizes there are periods of growth and there are periods of actually stabilization and then there's periods of decline. By comparison nature is complex it's relational it understands these deep connections it moves resources around the system to where it's needed as opposed to just accumulating wealth in in one area it's regenerative by design it's long term and it's fundamentally rooted and embodied in place and I think that's what we were starting to explore in this report of what could a finance system look like and so just I mean sorry to labour that a little bit but I think it's those principles and understanding some of those principles that that help for us to discern are we actually perpetuating businesses usual or are we actively working to support a different type of system a different financing of the future and I think that's what starts to tip the balance again these are going to be small examples to start with this is not about mobilising hundreds of millions of dollars but this is this is how I think we start to sort of discern where this future comes from yeah there's so many wonderful kind of examples that I could point to the small there's a wonderful project up in British Columbia and sort of Northwestern US called salmon returns which is working the idea of salmon as this sort of great sort of example of the cyclicality of life of where they only return to their birthplace as they go back up the river to die and there's a wonderful organisation that's supporting many community and indigenous led projects that are about restoring the regenerating land right they're really experimenting pushing the boundaries of what regenerative finance might look like Canada is a hotbed of innovation and indigenous led governance mechanisms that I find really inspiring there are examples in the Amazon there's a wonderful organisation called biofi project led by a lady called Samantha Power and she wrote a book around bio-regional financing facilities in this idea of sort of bio-regionalism and how that can actually support sort of longer term regeneration in place and they've just come up with a design for the Amazon sacred headwaters initiative in the Ecuador Peru of the headwaters of the Amazon so the sort of wonderful examples they're closer to home those examples we're starting to look at how do you start stacking different types of environmental payments to support long term regeneration and obviously you see it with projects like Natagal but like NEP and that these sort of exemplar kind of projects that are there but but starting to really think how do you take sort of longer term regenerative principles into that so I chair the board of the Trust Rocks which is Environment and then starting to do wonderful projects working with the NG revenues for local landowners but also working to really inspire communities to drive regeneration at the local level so I'm really interested in this idea of localism as one of the aspects of how we can do that there's many many examples but it's the quality of that engagement it's the values it's the behaviors and the principles that we're holding that I think are going to start tipping the balance towards what that more regenerative future might be I love that because I think we can often think what do we need to do create that will ultimately change the system like something new some new institutions some new instrument but actually what I'm hearing you say is that system change will really come from probably at first intentionality different thinking and then through principles that influence design of projects and I do think there's a huge I think you can feel the zeitgeist for place-based work I think and I mean something in the UK because some of that's led by devolution that people are returning to that thinking but also I think people recognise that resilience starts with that local approach whether it's social resilience environmental resilience economic resilience I'm really conscious of time it's just so much I'd love to ask and I'm sure everyone else has got so many questions for you but they'll be able to find you I'm sure and we'll we'll mention where they can find you at the end but just to kind of wrap up I mean I think people might might listen to this and feel okay but what do I do what would you recommend because we're sort of doer people aren't we rather than being people which is part of the problem I'm sure so is there any sort of work you recommend following books you recommend actions that we can start to take so many I want to just make one thing clear before I just get to that I think I want to be clear there is no critique of people who are working on nature finance within the system right that all of that is important and what I'm starting to argue more and more is that it's insufficient and we've got to be bolder and grasping the need for deeper transformation as well and then just to finalize that it's that that transformation I think I've lived in a world for 25 plus years believing that change was going to come top down and this is the whole premise of places like Davos and and right that if you just get CEOs and heads of state right those people are actually more embedded in the system they've got more to lose it's far harder to see how change is going to come from the center of the system and if you look at all the old stories and if you look at where change really happens change mostly occurs from the edges right and so one thing I would encourage people to just start to explore the edges because change is going to come bottom up you talked about place based the resilience of place based changes coming through our ability and what we need to do is get much smarter how do we connect up much smaller place based projects that start to point to a very different future and start to actually break down this sort of political bounds but or political kind of ideologies are there because people live in communities you know actually we need to start caring about our communities and the people we live close to and the places we live close to that's where change is going to come from so in terms of inspiration in terms of books I mean I think the most important thing I would say is actually for everybody working on nature finance the thing that gives me most confidence and most comfort is yeah there is some visceral connection we have to nature herself remembering that we are nature we are not separate from nature and so actually spending the time in nature is for me the greatest opportunity our community has to start to think differently and act differently for the future and find the courage and the boldness for me it was you know finally it was fasting down in Dartmore and the wonderful beautiful wilds of southwest England I was fasting for four days and there was this biblical delusion the river rose the river dart rose and it was like there was a moment of just realizing oh my goodness that I am not separate I am part of this and that I finally need to find the courage to challenge this and do and try and do this differently and try in a very small way be an inspiration for others to do that but that was nature herself speaking to me I don't want to anthropomorphize that but that's the biggest inspiration I have but I would also say you know look at some indigenous scholarship Robin Moore Kimmer is probably the easiest accessible people to about bringing sweet grass but the service berry yeah talks about an economy that is based on Giftson abundance as opposed to an economy that is based on extraction right so Robin Moore Kimmer has worked I think is great there's other many examples of that you know Kate Rewer is a great inspiration for me of actually writing about a different way of thinking about our economy, an economy that works for all of life. So Kate Rayworth's "Donut Economics" is an extraordinary book as well. I would, I mean, there's so many examples of some of the things I've pointed to and the talk, but I would also point to, you know, the science, right? We've just had it as 12 in the Manchester meetings that I know you're a big part of, right? But it there's 11, which was in Winter, Namibia, came out with two reports. One of the reports was commissioned in 2019 after the global assessment, which led up to the global biodiversity framework of the Kunming Montreal Agreement. But that transformative change assessment came in in December 2024, should be required reading for everybody working on nature finance. It doesn't shy away from the need for transformation. The scientists have been telling us for years and this is, I don't know, how many authors, hundreds of co-authors, I don't know how many hours of human endeavour have gone into that. But it's an extraordinary compendium of the need for transformative change and how we might go about it. It's the most important paper that for me in our agenda that nobody's heard of and very few people have read. And yet that is a blueprint for some of what we should be doing. So I could go on and on, but I've talked far too much and I've loved it. But I hope some of it's helpful. Oh gosh, Oliver, I think just to inspire a different ways of thinking as well. I think all of us can, you know, you're just there living your life, doing your job and it's hard to take a breath to look outside and think is this the most effective way, even if it feels extremely productive. So I do hope at some point, I'll be in, I'm just throwing this out into the, this is my intention, maybe seeing a star of festival at some point, I think that would be wonderful together. So many great people together to sort of share some of this thinking and, you know, I always think the more ideas you can put into the ocean of consciousness, the better and the more likely will stand a chance of change. And just in it's such a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the amazing work you're doing and for being sort of brave to think outside the box and challenge some of the status quo. Oh, thank you, Helen. And thanks for everything you are doing and you have done at GFI. I know your own time at GFI is coming to a close and I salute your own decision to step away and so excited for your next steps. And but yeah, excited to continue this conversation and whatever form and, but yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Well, that is a total wrap on our revenues for nature series. Thank you so much for coming along for the ride. I always welcome your feedback and love hearing what you're working on and you can find me on LinkedIn. As I alluded to, this is my last episode of Financing Nature as I will be leaving the Green Finance Institute at the end of April. It's been an incredible six years and I've so enjoyed working with such committed individuals in this field of nature finance both within GFI and and all over the world really and many of you I'm sure. And I know I'm heading off to a great team at GFI. But I'll be taking a summer break myself to explore this broader question of how do we turn the tide on biodiversity loss, especially for the UK. But one of my GFI nature team colleagues Phoebe Tucker is actually going to pick up the button for a short four-part series on UK nature finance running in May. So do check that out. She's going to be looking at water measurement tools, the UK carbon market and community finance and it's going to be fabulous I know. But it's been a pleasure being your host. We have 2000 followers of the podcast on Spotify alone and tens and tens of thousands of downloads and I must thank Robin Leiband for all his editing support. But I wanted to leave you with this. What is the bird that sings at the very beginning and end of this podcast? Because I picked it out like four and a half years ago and I have no recollection what that bird is anymore and I would really really love to know. So drop me a line if you do know at no cheating and I will owe you a beverage of your choosing. It's been a blast and thanks very much.