WEF 26 | Business Case for Nature

And for many years now, we at the New York Times, and many here at WEF and on this stage, have talked about nature, justly, as something we should protect. There’s a sort of moral imperative to this conversation. But I think if we’re being honest, we can acknowledge that that spirit of goodwill has only gotten us so far.

Increasingly, it seems like if we’re going to really protect nature, it will require not just charity, but real investment. And I say this not because it’s just the right thing to do, though it is. I say it because with each passing day, it is increasingly clear that nature is really a vital part of our economic infrastructure.

Forests regulate water systems. Wetlands absorb floods. Oceans stabilise food systems and trade routes.

These systems support the global economy in ways that we don’t always see. And they do so until they break. And when they do, the costs don’t just show up in abstract models.

They show up in insurance losses, in balance sheets, in disrupted food supplies, food insecurity, and even political instability. So the data is increasingly clear. Roughly half of global GDP depends on nature.

And as much as a quarter of global economic output could be at risk by the end of this century if more ecosystems are not protected. And yet, right where I began, investment in restoring and protecting these systems remains wildly out of sync with the scale of the risk. So how do we change this equation? Well, yes, we need profitable investment models.

Not just a return on capital, but maybe we could start thinking of it as a return on nature. So to help us sort of make sense of this moment, understand what the opportunities might be, we’ve got a fantastic panel here. To my immediate left is Andre Hoffman, the vice chairman of Roche Holdings and the interim co-chair and member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum.

We then have Kirsten Scout, director general of WWF International. Thank you for joining us. To her left is Rohini Nilakani, founder and chairwoman of Rohini Nilakani Philanthropies.

And finally, we have Fred Cao. Fred, thank you for joining us, chairman of TPC Group. So with that, let’s get started.

And I want to start, Andre, with you. You, as so many of us, have been arguing for years that, yes, we need to protect nature. And yet, talk to us from a board perspective.

I argued that the companies, perhaps, the economic systems, are not fully integrating this risk into their business models. What does it look like from where you sit? When you are in the room with these decision-makers, what is the conversation like when it comes to actually protecting nature? Well, thank you very much for inviting me here today. And it’s an absolutely crucial point, and it’s a point we’re trying to make in a different form since quite a number of years.

Why should a company, the board of which has a responsibility to allocate funds belonging to shareholders in the most efficient manner, why should they pay a premium for creating something that is sustainable and aligned with green, for want of a better word, green goals? And I think that there are a number of questions that we have to ask ourselves immediately. The definition of success, as we see today, is to increase shareholder value. And increasing shareholder value sometimes can go against the interest of the company itself.

Now, you refer to our family business, the Roche Pharmaceuticals. In the industry of health, in the business of health, we often have to do things which are not paying back immediately. In fact, about 8 out of 10 projects that go through the lab make it to the market.

So the idea that you have to do something which does not have an immediate rate of return is not as alien to our board, and it could be, for example, a fast-moving consumer goods company or something like this. So you need the right context. But the real thrust of your question is, what is nature for a company? And I think for that, there are two answers.

One is, it could be an opportunity if you identify the right things. And I can perhaps give you one or two examples of how we use that at Roche. But it is also a huge risk.

And for me, that’s the Trojan horse which allows us to talk about nature in the boardroom. Risk. When you allocate your assets, you have to protect it.

And protecting your asset once you’ve made the decision that you want to be in that direction has a lot to do with a whole catalogue of risk management. The typical example is the car. You buy a car, you wouldn’t dream of driving it without an insurance.

And yet when you take a business decision in a corporate environment, very often you take the decision on the basis of the cheapest possible price, and that is not including the premium of risk. The factory that you build next to a river, and the river, because of climate change, is flooding, and suddenly your factory is worthless. And these are risks that you can integrate when you think about them early on, and that is the role of the board, that’s what the board should do.

So risk management is, I think, an important part of what we should discuss at the board, and that has a lot to do with, yes, the concept of planetary boundaries, the concept that we are at the moment spending more than we have. We, every year, spend more than the planet can regenerate. I mean, the World Economic Forum has published this famous research saying that half of the world GDP, 53%, I think the world GDP depends on nature.

I’m sorry, I would say 100%. If you have no nature, you have no humanity, you have no business, you have no dividend, you have no shareholders, and you have no power at the web. Well, you’re the co-chair of the board, are you going to fix that? Absolutely, the board of the web.

Well, we have this year, for those of you who have read your paper before coming here, we’ve sort of devised the spirit of dialogue as the overarching theme, and we spoke about four strategic emergencies, strategic necessities. One, of course, is growth, and that’s a traditional territory of business. One is innovation, you know, what is innovation and what does it mean, how can we manage AI, how can we make sure that AI is useful and serves the purpose we want for, and all the paraphernalia around this.

The third one is humanity, people, you know, how can we invest in people. The fourth one, I’m afraid, is geopolitics. We need to talk about geopolitics, and I’m sure it will come back in our panel over the next couple of hours, sorry, couple of minutes, relax, relax.

Settle in, folks. And the fifth, of course, is, and that’s the first time we make it so evident, it’s how can we resolve these four strategic emergencies within planetary boundaries, because yet again, you cannot use something that you don’t have, and we need to do that. So if you want to remember what the forum is about, a simple line, we want to create resilient and sustainable growth, thanks to innovation within planetary boundaries.

Yeah, thank you. And I think that new frame is incredibly crucial, especially, if I may say, at a moment when the overt conversation about climate change, or rather, emissions, has really receded in the public dialogue, including here over the last six years. Kirsten, let me turn to you.

When you sit at the WWF International Headquarters, you play many roles, you work with many stakeholders. One of those groups of stakeholders is the corporate community, the private sector. When you are speaking with the CEOs, the board members, do you get the sense that they appreciate to what extent their businesses are actually reliant on nature, in the way that Andre just articulated? And if so, how are you starting to see them respond? So it’s a great question.

And I can answer that along two lines. First of all, it’s more the longer term perspective. So I was saying to you before, I’ve been in conservation 25, 30 years.

And when I started in conservation, I spent most of my time trying to explain to people what biodiversity means, what it is, trying to talk to corporates how important it is that they look at biodiversity and climate change as part of their business decisions and supply chains. I’m an economist. And I joined WWF as one of the few economists, because that’s the other side of the coin.

Most conservationists talk about intrinsic values of nature and biodiversity. So if I look, if I fast forward now 25 years later, there is a huge difference, right? So yes, I think from the side of the corporates, there’s an increased understanding in the role that biodiversity and nature more generally, I think, plays in business decisions and supply chains and so forth. For a large part, it’s also brought about by just the reality that, for example, climate change is happening in their own backyards, that corporates are seeing negative impacts of the loss of biodiversity directly on their supply chains and on their balance sheets.

At the same time, from a conservation organisation perspective, I think we have learned to speak the language of corporates more and more. So most of the big corporate partners in the world we work with, right, not because we love to work with corporates for the sake of work, and we get attacked quite a lot for working with corporate organisations, but because they play such a crucial role in conservation. So there is a huge shift, I will say, what used to be a conversation with corporates on climate and energy has definitely now also become a conversation with corporates on freshwater, on forests, on food.

I mean, one of the biggest examples, I think, where we’re seeing corporates moving into action is when it comes to agriculture and sustainable food, which is one of the biggest topics, right? If you don’t have good land and sustainable land and good soil, which is at the basis of everything, you just cannot have sustainable supply chains over the long term. So it’s moving. It’s definitely moving way too slow because we’re losing biodiversity in basically every place we care about, unfortunately.

But it’s moving, and there’s still a long way to go. OK, I mean, I think that that’s incredibly important to recognise. These two things can be true at the same time.

Yes, there is progress, and no, it’s not nearly fast enough. Rahini, before we walked on stage, you made what I think is a critical point. And I know you bring expertise in philanthropy.

But if I may, I want to harken back to something you said just a few moments ago, which is that it’s not enough for businesses to sort of continue with business as usual and then say, oh, yes, and by the way, as an afterthought, we’ll protect nature. They, you contended, need to make some fundamental reforms to the way they operate, not protecting nature as an afterthought, but actually integrating it into the way their operations are going every single day. Could you elaborate on that thought, please? Yeah.

So for people like me, I don’t run a business, but I’m a happy shareholder in my husband’s company, Infosys, and they take sustainability very seriously. And they take it seriously not just because they love nature or something. It just makes common business good sense.

And I’m going to give you an example before I talk about anything else. So for example, they have become leaders in high-performance buildings. OK.

And by continuously optimising even their existing buildings, they are able to avoid about 2.3 billion kilowatts of energy between 2008 and 2020. This is all meticulously recorded, which translates to something like 225 million USD in electricity bills. You have to do a little.

You don’t even have to wait the very long run. You can get your returns. A penny saved is a penny earned kind of thing.

Today, while their employee numbers are up 2.6 times, their electricity bills are up just 20%. They’ve kind of figured this out. And I’ll tell you, many, many companies in India where we have a very dense population on a relatively small land mass, there is no way companies are going to be water secure.

There’s no way they’re going to be supply chain secure unless they themselves go greener. There’s just not enough nature to go around unless everyone’s doing their best. I think I can give you several examples.

I won’t bore you. But a lot of industry is now headed in the direction of using as few natural resources through their supply chain as possible. And I think that’s a huge shift mentally.

To me, biodiversity is every country’s strategic advantage in the future. Where are your future medicines going to come from? Where is your future water going to come from? How are you going to… Today, heat has become such a huge issue in India. People are dying around the world because of heat.

We don’t notice it so much. How are you going to prevent urban heat islands? You’re going to have to plant more trees. You’re going to have to redesign some things.

I think the conversation has become deadly serious in India because we’re seeing what’s happening. And we’re also seeing how certain established best practises, some coming back to good design from our past, reapply are beginning to make a difference. The conversation is on the table.

I see a lot of philanthropic investment coming in. Now the corporate world has to create the new instruments financially to also bring in private capital to assist alongside philanthropic and government capital. If we don’t do it, what exactly is plan B? Yeah, Rohini, I think you make such an important point, which is that this is not a conversation about far-off eventualities.

This is starting to have real impact in the immediate. I think we’re all seeing that no matter where our geographies are these days. Fred, you’ve talked a lot about patient capital.

You are able to take a long-term view of investment and thinking about how some of these systems and payoffs may play out over not just years, but even decades or generations. And yet so much of our business world is on a much different time cycle. Most American corporations are operating on a quarterly basis.

That quick churn, that rush for instantaneous profits is becoming increasingly pervasive around the world. How do you bring that long-term view to a short-term world in a conversation like this? Well, in your long-term view, you have strategy for mid and short-term because you need cash flow, OK. So you don’t do this.

You have to do a portfolio balance so you can take a long-term view. Otherwise, you died already. But before that, I want to share a point about how we see, inform, how we think, and what we choose.

Nature to the Chinese is an expression of Tao or otherwise evolutionary energy. When we are not alive, we are part of nature. Nature is not outside us.

We are nature itself. Except this nature of human, which is not any animal, we are the most creative spiritual animal which can create destruction as well as part of the creation. And so we might understand, OK, you see it like that.

And you look at nature. It’s really awkward. The symptoms are coming, fire, water, rain, earthquake, human disaster, conflict.

Well, this is the expression of nature because we are nature, including our greed and evil side. And so if you understand this is this, we then know to sustain and flourish, you must be the representative of Tao on Earth in the material form because human is the most spiritual, creative, and we’re working for Tao or otherwise people might call God. Or the scientists will call the evolutionary energy.

So if you evolve, you know you can sustain. And change is only observed reality. And there are laws to change.

I love this perspective. And I think it’s exactly the kind of first kind of conversation we frankly don’t have enough in forums like this, which really gets to our spirituality, to use your word. Our ethical responsibility, not in some sort of abstract corporate way, but at a really human to human level.

So thank you for bringing it up. I want to press you just one moment, though, because we live in a world where certain actors, many of whom are here in this town this week, have outsized influence on the lives of billions of people. And it is all too often the case that the choices they make may serve themselves, may serve business models, but don’t always serve the best interests of the greatest number of people or of our natural systems.

So how is it that you instil this view, this understanding of the spiritual imperative in those with the most responsibility? Well, first of all, I saw long ago that there is a change of the definition of well-being and happiness. Something that we all want, every one of us, it’s our common goal. We just want to be well and happy, family well and happy, even the forest well and happy.

Now, that’s a different definition. The United Nations already pointed out it’s not GDP. We’re working for GNH.

So today we have a lot of people, a lot of GDP, but reducing GNH, that is not very clever, because that’s all we want. So first of all, realise, because greed will blindness and become ignorant of this, which we can see today. So I started a division called Octave.

And Octave is to create this new well-being economy, a new way of living, and so forth. So I had a conversation with my youngest son. And he just finished an intern.

That was a couple of years ago. He finished an intern with a company. And I said, hey, son, we have so many things.

What do you like to do in the family business? He said, I like this new division. But dad, you’ve been losing money for 15, 20 years, nonstop, not one year. How can I make it when you can’t make it? So I told my son, that’s an accounting era.

They put it out and express it in P&L, because there’s an accounting rule. But we are investing really long term. This is investment in progress.

Think differently. And I said to him, we are a family business. What I cannot finish, you can.

If you can finish, your descendants can. Because I know this era will arrive. In fact, I see it arrived.

Well, we should be so lucky to have more stewards like you. Andre, let me return to you. In the corporate world especially, we’re seeing a flurry of commitments.

I mean, for whatever I said about climate change taking a backseat, it’s also the case that hardly a day or week goes by without a new corporate pledge to protect nature, in some way or another, showing up in my inbox. And yet, I mean, I’ll confess, even for myself, it can be hard to distinguish between what is real, what is real progress, what is real investment in the long term, and what, frankly, is greenwashing. And I wonder, from where you sit, how do you evaluate between one and the other? How do you assess whether something is a meaningful investment that could have real returns, or is simply another pledge that’s designed to garner headlines? And I wonder if you can point to some of the examples that you feel like are real working.

Well, first of all, I’d just like to go back to what Fred just said, you know, the spirituality. And I think there is a turn in the history of the planet. And for those of you who were perhaps in Plano a couple of, an hour ago, Johan Rockström showed us the latest planetary check, what does it look like.

And he talks about these hockey sticks with absolutely every sort of use of resources, every result that’s negative for the environment. And I think we can put a date at about the late 70s, the beginning of the 80s, where suddenly the business of business is business became the only prerogative of corporate. You know, we are there to make money.

And there is this facility to say, we measure profit, we measure success by the bottom line, profitability. And suddenly, it’s no longer a question of morality. You know, it’s we, sorry, not we, because I’m a shareholder and not a manager, but they, the managers, have to be there to show positive results, because otherwise they won’t be taken seriously.

So that definition of success depends. So it’s no longer immoral, it’s amoral. It’s just not my problem.

You know, my problem, my thing is to make money. And then I will distribute to society to create prosperity, and society will deal with the externalities, as Milton Friedman put it. And that we all, we now know, I mean, 30 years, 40 years later, it’s not working.

You know, you cannot ignore externalities, they come back. And so we need to do something about that. So just to say that I have a lot of respect for successful managers, who over the years have created fantastic businesses, who have yielded enormous amounts of money.

But they have been following the wrong principle. And it’s not a question of they’re doing it right, or they’re doing it wrong, or they’re trying to actually destroy the planet. They are convinced that by doing this, they correspond to the model that they’ve been taught at business school, at university.

I’ve been to business school, and that’s what I was taught. So I just want to say that if we change the parameter, if we identify what it is that makes a business more successful, in particular, if we manage impact and not just income, we can get to a very different place. I’m very embarrassed because Mark Goff, the CEO of Capital’s Coalition, who knows much more about this than I do, is standing there, or rather sitting, sorry.

We need to put together an accounting system which allows us to understand the impact that, as businesses, we have on the social capital, the human capital, and nature. So the social capital, us, the human capital, you and I, are we happy? Are we in the right place? Are we really contributing to society in the best possible way? And then nature, of course, but nature not. I’m sorry, the panda, but nature, the life support system on Earth.

How can we continue to exist? How can we continue to create business if there is no nature anymore? We don’t exist. So if we can put these three parameters together, we can come to what I would call the produced capital, which is the one we measure at the moment. But if you want this produced capital to be robust, we need to take into account the three first impacts on the three capitals.

And that could be the filter on which you look at these pledges. We had a pledge at Roche that by 2040, we would be net zero. Not net, sorry, but absolute zero.

We now realise it’s a big commitment. It’s going to be very difficult to do that. So we started a sustainability strategy.

We have a corporate sustainability officer who refers directly to the highest echelon of the company. We’re taking it step by step across the value chain. We lower packaging.

We diminish the amount of energy needed. I know all these really coherent systems, but we realise that there is going to be at the end four or five percent, perhaps three percent of CO2 emission that we’re just not going to be able to do much about it if technology does not progress. So what do we do? We invest in technology in the meantime.

And then we start talking about compensation. But that’s a whole new subject. We perhaps don’t want to go into.

The CO2 market in general is a very complicated beast. And it paves the way towards nature-based solutions. I mean, I think that’s the appropriate segue.

Kirsten, I wonder if you could speak to some of the specific examples. You’re familiar with the projects out there and you contend that there are real profitable investments in nature. You’re helping put some of them together.

Would you tell us about some of the ones that you could point to that you say, here is a model that is going to work? Yeah, I mean, again, there are so many examples and even the smaller ones I think are really, really interesting to mention. But the one that everybody talks about and that I will speak about again because it’s such an exciting opportunity is the Tropical Forest Forever Fund, which is launching COP30. And the reason why I keep pointing that one out is because it is a paradigm shift in how we think about funding.

So here, so of course, tropical forests, you know, hugely under threat, incredibly important, not just locally, but for the world, right? In terms of climate regulation, all sorts of environmental services, lots of beautiful species living there and lots of indigenous groups and local communities dependent on that. So, I mean, in terms of economic value, massive. Yet, these are also seriously under threat.

And for, you know, for decades, we’ve been trying to work through all sorts of processes to see, okay, how can we put an economic value on forests? How can we make sure that companies who are sourcing products or farming products, soy, beef, palm oil, that are leading to deforestation, that we can turn things around. And every single time we fail, there’s not been enough. So what’s interesting about the Tropical Forest Forever Fund, it’s an initiative by the Brazilian government that WWF and other organisations have worked with for many, many years to get this launched at COP30.

It’s number one, it’s the biggest, if we get there, it’s going to be the biggest fund in tropical forests. But what’s cool about it, it’s really about paying countries for standing forests. So it’s not about, you know, avoiding deforestation, but it’s making sure that you compensate countries.

And it’s the three big basins. So it’s the Amazon basin, it’s the Congo basin, then it’s forests in Southeast Asia, like Indonesia. The second thing is that it’s investment.

It’s not grant money. So investors, whether it’s governments, private sector, put money in this fund, and they get a return. So they get their money back, but they also get interest back.

And with that, they’re going to be looking for bonds and investing it in the market. And with the profit, they’re going to be compensating countries to keep their forest standing. And so the other interesting thing, which may sound minor sitting in a panel in a forum like this, but it’s actually essential, which is that this fund will allow local communities and indigenous people to access the money.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over all these years of conservation is that unless we really deeply engage local community, people who live in the Amazon forests and other places in conservation, it’s not going to be sustainable. So we have to make sure that these people access the fund. And that’s the other cool thing about the TFFF.

So this, I think, is one really concrete example that, you know, I think we’ve raised close to 7 billion. So we still have a long way to go. We’re hoping to double it by the end of this year, but this is a really important one.

And there are other examples where, again, the lens has been through investment. I will say one thing, and I said it earlier as well. We’re speaking a lot about, okay, how can we make conservation profitable? How we can put an economic value on nature? All that is important.

And for the sake of conservation, I will do it. But I will also say there is a flip side to this. And that is that companies, private sector, investors, financial market, you know, we all have a responsibility.

This isn’t just about NGOs and others making sure that we finally make conservation profitable, but that we also make sure that we green the financial sector and that we make sure that nature, climate, you know, conservation are part of every single discussion and decision when it comes to risk and opportunity. And that is another process. I just want to put that out there.

Yes, you know, making investments profitable is really important, but we also have to make sure that we keep on working closely and talking to the financial sector and the private sector to make sure that they actually integrate the impact that they have on nature and climate in their supply and in their decision-making processes. Mm-hmm, and that’s all right on. If I may, I want to introduce a case study, one that I’m very familiar with, having just written about it extensively in a recent book.

And that’s the company Patagonia. This is a clothing company based in California. And I bring it up because it’s very relevant to this conversation.

What the founder did three years ago was donate all of his equity into a new series of trusts and instructed the for-profit company, which has annual profits of roughly $100 million a year, to donate all those profits to conservation and environmental activism on an ongoing basis. And this is a different model. This is not Patagonia investing in parts of nature that are strategic to its supply chain, for example, but it is a for-profit company saying, we are going to use our profits in a fundamentally different way.

To Andre’s point, we are not going to follow the Friedman pursuit of profits at all costs and return of capital to shareholders. Instead, we understand that we have a different set of shareholders, that is the earth. They talk about earth being their only shareholder.

And so Rohini, I wonder if you could pick up on that point and expand our view of the philanthropic role in this conversation. Because it is the case that philanthropy can play a really important role, not only in anchoring major conservation investments, but also in paving the way and showing other corporations and organisations where they might be able to go. Yeah, thank you, David.

I think I speak mostly from my experience in India, but India has the largest number of people in any country, even beyond China. And when people and nature are jostling together, there’s always going to be conflict. And the idea of development, as we see it today, when it is positioned as in opposition to nature, that’s when all the problems begin.

We haven’t still figured out how to give up the or and make it an and. But in India, there are a lot of civil society organisations. India is deeply connected to its biodiversity culturally for 5,000 years.

And people live with the wild all around us with very high tolerance. So I am lucky as a philanthropist in India that there are hundreds of very good organisations working at tiny scale to very large scale. There’s the Ecological Restoration Alliance.

Now, when philanthropists like myself support some of this work, it has tangible benefits on the ground for both people and nature. And when corporations around that see the benefits to people, because eventually they also have to be good neighbours. We are seeing because of something called the CSR law in India, Corporate Sustainability Responsibility, that a lot of the philanthropic work, as an example, is picked up by corporations as part of their annual sort of giving forward.

So that has worked well because we’ve created good examples through the work of a lot of NGOs in how to restore, how to be stewards. We also have very good laws in India where indigenous people, people who have lived in forests for centuries, gets rights to the forest so that they can make a livelihood out of minor forest produce. But in exchange, they have to make sure that the forest stays in stock.

So they are stewards of the forest but are still able to make a livelihood from it in a sustainable way. I think some of these examples are going global. I’m very much impressed with the Tropical Forever Forest Fund, but we need many more such things because I, as a citizen, I simply cannot see the dichotomy at all between business and nature.

It has to go together and we have to hold firms, especially large firms, accountable to the externalities that they are creating that are causing so much loss to so many billions of real people on the ground to say nothing of nature itself. So I don’t see it as, but I’ll tell you one thing that’s more hopeful. I personally think it’s a 25 to 30-year-old problem only.

Somehow all of us together have to create the energy and the innovation to get past these 25 years. No matter what the conversation on the table this moment, I do believe in 25 to 30 years when my grandson, who’s an ardent environmentalist at nine, when he’s 40 years old, I believe it’ll be a very different planet. We will be post the demographic bump.

You know, human population is coming down quite rapidly. I think we are going to be post-fossil fuel no matter what, which gives nature a chance to recover anyway. And I think we are going to be post the current kind of consumption because of the demographic shift.

And automatically that means that you will be at least reducing the pillage of nature over time. So if we can get the right sort of model for just these 25 years, think of it as not a very long-term problem and that we can do it. I think those of us who are alive 25, 30 years from now are going to see a very different and much greener world.

I truly believe that. And that’s a very provocative frame. I like that, Rohini.

Yeah, and a bit of optimism as well. Fred, I wonder if you could return us to this theme of patient capital. And I want to hear your specific examples of where you believe investing in nature works.

But just briefly, not every company as we’ve now acknowledged has the luxury of being patient with its capital. So two questions. One, what advice do you give to managers and directors of corporations who are under more immediate pressure? How can they start to think more long-term, behave more long-term? And then can you also point to some of the examples that give you hope in this conversation? Well, first of all, I don’t think nature is everything.

We’re just sick. So we don’t get well, we die. It’s as simple as that.

Nature will correct itself, right? That’s how they say. So family business has a lot of capital, from philanthropy to various VC all the way to industry capital or PE capital, the whole scope. So we are the best in position to use the different capital to align them and tee them up a possibility.

So when you’re investing here, you have all the possibility. Of course, you write off some. As you move on, like VC only need to hit one in six.

You’re already very well. So you think about a different thing from an investment point of view, you line it up, of course, the possibility. Now let’s talk about a one project that we do.

It’s a nonprofit project, but actually philanthropy money can tee up downstream to impact and so forth. And I set up a Restore Nature as one of the three nonprofit. I have a social called Octave Institute, Restore Nature, which is linked to our industrial department.

And then we have money supply chain impact investment fund management. So they look at land and sea. I used to be in the palm oil industry.

Okay, everybody know that’s a real challenge here in Southeast Asia. But my mom is very lucrative. You know, if you ask palm oil owners, get out of it.

They’re kidding me. They’re landlords, right? So I understand I’m one of them. So I said to them, okay, I’ve got to sell.

And I’m going to do an experiment and do a restoration. So of course, in Indonesia, the carbon credit and everything, forget it. You can’t count on it.

So we start thinking, all right, let’s do a complex business model. Of course, we have to deal with indigenous tribe and all the factor when you’re doing it. So it’s a much more complete 16 goes into it.

And in there, we start thinking, well, how about we grow medicine, jungle medicine? And of course, there are Indonesian jungle herbs too, but it’s not this great of Chinese medicine. The mini of this clean land Chinese medicine, it’s worth a lot. But what is a seed? I don’t know.

We plant it and seed. And you just let it go with it, make the immigration, migration to Indonesia. But if that’s successful, wow, preservation, even your preserved land, you just scare the seed and you just have people harvest.

So great jobs, great everything. Then we start thinking, well, ecotourism, really great, it’s beautiful. And then we’ll put a school to learn about ecotourism because we are designing this as a school where our executives go there for two months to learn because you don’t feel until you do it.

So it’s some chart and some words. We are emotionally emotive people. You have no connection and you learn and you do, you do community, you plant.

That’s very important for transformation. So then of course, you can do supply chain. And of cottage industry, all we need to do is do your handicraft.

We can design it and we can market. So there are many components we can develop a complex business model that’s went on. If this work, I know I’m one of them, land owner, just how much money.

And palm oil is a five-year cycle. That means the minute they go in there, it works. They can still juice out all the other, but in 25 years, the industry can disappear.

But then I think the most important thing is structural change in organisation. So number one, we were being family business. Andre knows very well, the three circle, complex relationship, conflict thing.

But if you take out one circle, which is shareholder, now you only have a touch between business and family. The conflict, the thinking, the thinking change. So I said, okay, we put this in the trust, no more shareholders.

The family served the purpose. And I did the mission called serve the well-being of life while create wealth. So once you restructure your organisation, many things can be done.

If you don’t restructure, it’s very difficult. Then we promote, we have to be CEO of love, promote love philanthropy, because that’s a solution to all problems. The CEO of love, this is the right panel.

Yeah, CEO of love. But you will have a dividend of joy besides your money. There we go.

And that is the best medicine for well-being. All right, I’m moderating that panel next year. We’ve got just a couple of minutes left.

I’d love to go down the line and I want to call to action. What is your call to the corporate community on how they can take action on this critical issue? Andre, please, with you. So to frame it as punchy as possible, we shouldn’t leave nature to civil society.

Corporate individuals are individual like any other. I mean, the majority of people who work for us are members of WWF. And so this idea of saying doing business is about not taking care because I can restore it later for philanthropy is just not on.

That’s finished. We are all in the same planet. We’re all swimming in the same pool.

If the pool is polluted or the pool is damaged somewhere, we are all going to suffer. So my call to action would be to say, make sure that whatever you do, you make a contribution to one of the three capitals once a day. Be nice to people, help the old lady to cross the road, cut off the engine, all this sort of thing.

But do a small gesture every day. And then we can shift that system. But the very important thing is that we stop talking about conservation.

We have to start talking about management of the global common. And that global common is not just nature, it’s nature also. Okay, thank you.

Kirsten? I would say two things. Number one, do no harm. So start with that.

Forget about all the complicated investments, but just look at your own investments, your own supply chains, and see where you are impacting nature and where it’s disappearing. And so I think that’s the first one, is just do no harm. And the second one, I think very much linked to what Andre was just saying, is that if you really want to scale, you have to take an approach to, again, including nature into your decision-making.

It’s not rocket science. It really isn’t. It’s basic stuff.

Where’s your investments? Where’s your supply chains? How is it impacting forests and nature? And then make sure that you include those things to your decision-making processes. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. She said it’s so much better.

Rahini? I would say I think the business case for nature has already been made. I think to the corporate sector decision-makers, I would say really close your eyes. See the interdependence between everything that you do, you produce, the services you create, and the web of life.

Go out into nature quietly by yourself. You will come back with the right questions and hopefully the right answers. It should be almost essential.

Thank you. Go out there. Come to India.

We’ll show you tigers. We’ll show you just the most magnificent creatures that will make us think, this is the planet that we share. And that, what are my grandchildren going to live with? Think of that.

Thank you. Fred? Well, you know, wellness is the biggest trend. The corporate people are in part of the wellness.

Because we don’t invest in ourselves very well in our own wellness. Everybody’s stressed out, right? That’s the worst thing for health. So wellness is the king.

You see the world is now deconstructing to create a new financial system, a new economic system, a new political system. It’s all deconstructing and reconstructing the new world order system. It is happening.

Business need to transform. They know it. Every business know it.

We need to transform. So transform. Take full responsibility and get rid of fear and get more love into it.

Because there’s no creativity in fear. It’s just neutralise and do whatever you’re doing. But we can do it together.

Because we cannot succeed. This is a market economy. To transform economy is like transforming culture.

Business must lead the way. But I understand the difficulty. I particularly call on family business, which long term, which are more flexible and don’t have layer and layer of shareholders and fund manager and bigger fund managers.

So I call on, we are on the same FBN network. Take full responsibility and rock and roll in the impact. And you get the dividend of joy.

The dividend of joy. I think that’s what we’re all looking forward to enjoying this year, especially. To our panellists, thank you all very much.

Thank you for our attentive audience. Thank you.