What if your next big market didn’t exist yet - but needed to?

A direct challenge to financiers, traders, investors, PE, VCs, and anyone with capital and imagination

Let me start with the obvious: capitalism is flawed. But it’s also the system that has delivered huge improvements in human living standards. It drives innovation. It creates wealth. It pushes society forward. Imperfectly, yes, but powerfully. If we want to change the system, it won’t be by scrapping capitalism. It will be by redirecting it. And that’s where natural capitalism comes in.

At its core, natural capitalism is about valuing renewable natural resources. Forests, oceans, air, biodiversity, sunlight, soil, not just ecologically, but economically. It’s about creating real markets that value the things we’ve long taken for granted, and in doing so, changing the incentives that drive land use, business decisions, and investment flows.

If you agree that capitalism is here to stay, then the only way to protect the planet within that system is to make nature investable.

We are seeing early attempts to correct it. The carbon market is maturing, with improved monitoring, clearer rules, and more credibility. In the UK, Biodiversity Net Gain is creating real demand for habitat restoration. These are working examples of natural markets. But they are small, slow, and mostly built on regulation. They will not scale fast enough unless we start seeing nature as a source of value, not just a liability to offset.

Which brings us to what I believe is the real golden egg of natural capitalism: value creation. Too often we think of natural capital as a ledger of costs, of damage to be repaired or emissions to be offset. But some resources like the sun generate value from day one. Solar is a pure expression of natural capitalism. The sunlight is free. The technology to harness it is falling in price. The output, energy, is monetisable and tradable.

We need more of this. More models where natural capital doesn’t just cushion the blow, but delivers growth. Could the oceans hold scalable protein sources? Could rewilded land produce health outcomes that drive down NHS spending? Could soil restoration increase crop yields and create tradable resilience credits?

And that word “resilience” is becoming increasingly central.

As the climate shifts, resilience is fast becoming an economic asset in its own right. Cities, governments, and corporations are being forced to think differently: about flood defences, about river and wetland restoration, about how to manage drought, fire risk, and extreme heat. And all of that has enormous financial implications - especially for the insurance industry, whose actuarial models are being rewritten in real time.

Natural infrastructure like mangroves, wetlands, and tree cover isn’t just beautiful, it’s functional and insurable. And in that functionality lies value.

The ideas are beginning to form. The science is improving. Regulation is coming. But not enough capitalists are thinking about this problem and trying to solve for it. 

If you’re reading this and you’re a financier, a markets trader, an investment banker, someone in private equity, or you know someone like that, challenge them. Challenge them to think about how nature can be valued in new ways. Not just through regulation or obligations, but through market creation, investment, and innovation. 

Nature is not just a cause. It is an asset class. And the capitalists who move first will own the future.