Episode 78: The case for (investing in) nature

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. This week, we're exploring what might be the most overlooked tool in our climate toolkit: nature itself. While we ok yeah, I mean me guilty geek over here often talk about technological solutions like fusion or direct-air carbon capture or electric vehicles or consumer compost devices, there's a whole world of climate solutions that nature has already perfected over millions of years.

We're talking about mangroves that protect coastlines while storing massive amounts of carbon, peatlands that regulate water supplies for entire cities, and forests that can be integrated into our food systems. But here's what's really interesting - we're ALSO seeing a fundamental shift in how the financial world views these solutions. Institutional investors who manage trillions of dollars in pension funds and endowments are starting to see the commercial potential in protecting and restoring nature.

It's a convergence of environmental necessity and economic opportunity that could transform how we tackle both the climate crisis and the broader ecological emergency we're facing. So today let’s talk to an investor and author working on all of that as a division inside the investment fund that was founded by Al Gore.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

So my name is Sid, Sadatrika, you can call me Sid. I'm working on all sorts of things. So my climate passion has always been nature. It's the role of nature, our relationship with nature, the ways in which it can be an incredible climate solution, and the ways in which it truly is in crisis. And so that's what I've been working on for a very long time. I started off as an ecologist, but I've spent the last decade in the space in lots of different roles. We can get into that. But a whole mix of academia, commercial work, entrepreneurial work.

I'm currently an investor at Just Climate. We're an investment firm that's part of Generation Investment Management. We're dedicated to making climate-led investing a capital allocation imperative. really, in my role, what I do is try and move institutional capital into some of the highest impact climate and now nature solutions.

Molly Wood

Let's start maybe with the current role and move backwards. So Just Climate sits within Generation Investment Management. Maybe give us a little background on Generation and how Just Climate came to be.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Yeah, so Generation was founded 21 years ago now by...

Vice President Al Gore and David Blood used to be head of Goldman Sachs asset management and several investors who'd been in the space before and saw that sustainability simply, this is well before ESG was even a term, right? This was the days when it just wasn't even clear that sustainability should be a consideration in investment decision making. And Generations, mentioning the whole way through, has been to make sustainable investing mainstream, making a capital allocation imperative. And what they've done over 20 years is prove that you

Sustainability considerations aren't just a nice to have, they're fundamental to long-term investment decision making, and that you can tie long-term financial performance and out-performance with a really strong consideration for environmental, social, and governance factors in investment decision making. that's generation. Generation's operated across lots of different types of investing. So public markets is where we began. We've also been in the private markets for a very long time. So there are several strategies in what we call growth equity. And they touch on three.

people as human health, planetary health and financial inclusion. But we also have other private market strategies that are focused on long-term capital for companies that are much larger. But then Just Climate was founded around the Glasgow Cops, so in 2021, in part because we had...

Siddarth Shrikanth

investors and companies come to us and say, know, we've been engaging on net zero plans for a long time and some of those actions are achievable with current technology, but many of solutions aren't at scale yet. So if you think about steel or cement or aviation or indeed the food and land use sector, we simply don't have the technologies or the business models available to change those, our value chains and turn them into what you would consider sustainable.

doing about it and so just climate really has found it out of that and need to really focus on the highest impact climate solutions and then drive capital onto them so they can scale and meet some of the biggest decarbonization challenges we have.

Molly Wood

Right?

Molly Wood

great. And then within Just Climate, you focus on nature-based solutions as, and I feel like we should keep putting a fine point on this, an investment category, an opportunity.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Absolutely, So just climate is not, I mean, there are lots of different types of capital in the world and we need all of them. need public money is incredibly important for everything we do. Philanthropic sources of capital are really important. There are blended forms of capital that, know, what you traditionally consider impact investing. Ultimately, where we sit in that capital allocation spectrum is we are commercial investors.

Right, well we do have innovation around how we compensate ourselves to align long-term incentives with climate impact. But fundamentally what we're trying to do is make the case that it is possible with a highly specialized, thematic investment approach in some of the categories that we're looking at. So strategy one is around industrial climate solutions. Strategy two is around natural climate solutions. If you build specialist teams, you integrate, you launch the integrated impact and the decision-making process, you start with the climate impact. So you say, what are the biggest problems we need solving?

where are the emissions coming from? And you follow that all the way through to business models that make sense, then you support them as they scale, it should be possible to invest commercially and generate both attractive risk adjusted returns and the climate impact that we need.

Molly Wood 

Right. OK, now let's talk about your background and the book and the idea of incorporating nature-based solutions kind of at scale.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Yeah, I mean, the book, we should probably take a few steps back.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, take all the steps back. What's your deal, Sid?

Siddarth Shrikanth

I think all this has back. my gosh. I've always loved nature. I've never needed any reason to protect or restore nature. I think it's been incredibly obvious to me that we are nature. We're part of the natural world. We are, in a sense, also custodians and stewards of the natural world. I've never needed any additional reason beyond nature's amazing, we should do something about it. It's also no secret that we've... I've really found...

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Where did that come from just out of curiosity? Were you just like a super outdoorsy kid?

Siddarth Shrikanth

Well, outdoorsy in family history, my great-granddad and my grandma, mean, big conservationists, they've lived and worked all over Asia, India specifically, but all over Asia really, on nature protection and restoration back in the day. And in some ways, all of this was less developed, but there was more nature left to lose, so different time, different challenges.

But I always grew up with a massive appreciation for the natural world and love for the natural world. I think it began then and it grew when I spent more time actually studying ecology and conservation biology and evolutionary biology. So I was at Oxford for that, my biology degree. And it was amazing. The terms are really short, so you spend lots of time actually on site in the field, working on this directly and understanding what...

Molly Wood 

Hmm.

Siddarth Shrikanth

nature is, how works, how ecology works, how it's changing all the time. And I loved it. So for me, it was incredibly obvious that this was the most important thing, certainly for the energy I have and that I have to give. But the book came out of a sense of, I mean, there's lots of ways to describe this challenge, but fundamentally, our relationship with nature is...

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

So then you wrote a book, we should go all the way to like people have no, you what's the book called? When did it come out? It's pretty new. It's okay, you can, you know, you can pimp yourself here. This is your moment. Yes, this is the moment for self-promotion.

Siddarth Shrikanth

It's called The Case for Nature. If this is the moment for self-promotion, I'll do it. Excellent. So the book's called The Case for Nature. The subtitle is, well, there's two subtitles, but really it's about solutions for the other planetary crisis. And the reason I say the other planetary crisis is we think about climate, we don't really think about nature. It's a slow moving, but in some ways, worse crisis, because it's been going on for longer.

The state of nature is worse and many of those changes are irreversible and no one's paying very much attention. all of those things are more true, they're certainly true of climate, but they're in some ways more true of nature. But most people have no idea of the stuff that's going on. And so I think it's a great shame that both... for climate and for nature and for that intersection, we've generally done a not very good job of communicating both the challenges but also some of the incredible things that are happening across the world. And they come from really unexpected places. you know, in the book I chose to highlight cases that were from, you know, unexpected parts of the world. So technology, but rather than just go straight to Silicon Valley where I was living at the time, I chose to highlight cases by a friend of mine in Kenya to measure a model for ecosystems. We can go down into case studies at some point.

But it was also a huge amount of freedom to go just follow curiosity without, mean, with any job you have an angle. I think with this, I actually didn't have an angle. just went in and said, tell me, tell me what you do and why you do it. And whether that was a community NGO or a government or a big business or a startup.

That lens was really helpful because people really open up and many of those people had never been asked why they do what they do and what exactly they do, what are you working on? And so it was just a delight.

Molly Wood

All right, what are you working on? Yeah. Yeah. And so the book is a series of case studies of companies or actions or NGOs, like you said, are described sort of like the breadth of stories that you encountered here.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Exactly.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

I tried to use a kind of narrative nonfiction style. So rather than make it a textbook, there are lots of very good textbooks on natural capital, this idea of valuing nature. I know those books are amazing. I know that no one else I know has read them, and there's a reason. And so I was very keen not to make it a textbook. And instead I said, let's kind of turn this into part travelogue.

know, kind of case study thing, whatever you call it. But it really is just storytelling from place across the world on some of the most important themes. So whether it's...

the role of finance or technology, whether it's carbon markets or ecotourism or how we change our food system, whether it's the role of indigenous peoples and local communities. I kind of start and end with more personal reflections on my own relationship with nature, how it's changed, what I've learned, how much further we have to go. So it is quite personal at points, but it's really meant to be an easy read where you can kind of follow along and understand what's going on. And if you want to go deeper, those textbooks are always available.

And those amazing kind of academic papers are always available. But I didn't try and replicate that work. I was trying to translate that work for a general audience. so my ideal, you know, I almost wrote this with my sister in mind, or lots of people I bump into in my life who are interested in nature and climate. They definitely care. They want to learn more. But they couldn't imagine actually trying to go read one of those academic papers or textbooks and really digging in because ultimately stories engage people.

and there are some amazing stories to be told in this space in particular.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about the nature crisis and the climate crisis and how they are different but also feeding each other in some very dangerous ways. And also how to invest in nature.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate about the case for nature.

Molly Wood 

So talk a little bit more about these twin crises, the nature crisis and the climate crisis, which sort of really exist both in parallel but feed each other.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Yeah, yeah, there are twin crises. I mean, there's multiple crises when people say people prefer polycrisis. There's lots of crises. Polyperma crisis is exactly. It certainly feels that way in many ways. But the way I think about it is at least with these two crises, they share some common drivers and they also share some common effects.

Molly Wood 

Sure. I was gonna say, Polly, perma-crisis is a term I'm hearing lately. So many.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

But they are distinct, right? So if you think about the ecological, those kind of rolling set of ecological crises that have happened across the world, in some ways it began well before the advent of fossil fuels. Right? So the human footprint 12,000 years ago is when it kind of really skyrocketed and it's been, it's been climbing ever since. And so most of the world's surface is human managed.

There very few truly, there's almost no truly wild spaces. Some of that land is steered by indigenous peoples and has been for a long time and is generally, you know, there's a huge amount of biodiversity that still thrives alongside people. But in most cases, when the human footprint expands, the nature footprint declines. And you've seen that with the expansion of agricultural systems, you've seen that with, you know, development and infrastructure more generally. But if you think about what drives what drives biodiversity loss, habitat loss is the biggest one.

We just convert natural habitats to things that we like, so monoculture plantations or whatever else. Overexploitation is the other big one, so overfishing in the oceans is by far the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. There's invasive species that we've introduced all over the world.

So we move species that were never meant to be there. And so you take a cane toad and you put it in Australia. And of course it will wreak havoc because natural predators don't exist. And so most extinctions of birds, for example, have happened on island populations where you introduce a predator, could literally be a cat or a snake or a mouse. And you end up with massive population collapse. And we've done that over and over and over again. So you take these three things and you combine them and well before climate change came along.

and we were already causing a wave of extinctions. You then add the stress of climate change and you get what ends up being these two crises with similar drivers in terms of our economic model, a model that doesn't value functioning natural systems. So we absolutely use the fact that nature is an amazing carbon store, right? That nature continues to draw down tremendous amounts of carbon every single year.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

We absolutely use the fact that nature is fundamental to the cycling of nutrients in the way we grow food and feed the planet. And services like pollination sustain half the world's food crops.

So we use that, but we assume it's free. Our economic system largely doesn't account for the value there or the externalities of negative externalities of destroying that. The same in some ways is true of climate change. We don't consider the cost of carbon pollution.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

The reason I think they deserve at least distinct treatment, if not, they are many interventions can solve both things. So the restoration of ecosystems, for example, can draw down huge amounts of carbon and create habitats for biodiversity. But there are also reasons to understand.

the drivers of nature are separately and find business models that are economic models. I actually use those terms interchangeably at points, but in the book I realized they were actually quite distinct because a business case, I mean, depends on how you use this term, but I'm not really talking about private profit in every case. I'm talking about economic value. So I use the case study of cities as a whole chapter on how cities have brought nature back into urban spaces. And the beneficiaries are people, but they're also public health systems.

that benefit from lower costs from air pollution, better mental health, better physical health. There's real economic value there. It's not private profit, it's actually just public health. considering the economic case can be really meaningful.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. So then tell me how this, don't, I don't, I don't want to over rotate on the investment in private profit part of it, although we are fundamentally a business podcast. but I do want to stipulate that the reasons for preserving nature, like you said, are many and should be obvious.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

But I also wonder then how you take this into your work as an investor. And it sounds like if you're investing at just climate, you're looking at nature solutions and nature-based solutions that have a climate impact specifically, right? Like, how does this become your day job?

Siddarth Shrikanth

Yeah, there are so, so there's actually towards the end, and this is a great question. Towards the end, I kind of rather than come up with a list of prescriptions for policymakers and businesses, I actually tried to focus on individuals reading the book. And I said, what can I do with my time and energy? And I think there are so many ways this could become your day job. It's, and those, those ways are multiplying by the day. wherever you sit, there's, there's some.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm. no, mean, how did it become now, now you, Sid, how is this your day job?

Siddarth Shrikanth

That is inexplicable. It's just like lots of luck and just the good grace of nature I guess. for me it's the, so my day job, think what we try and do is find business models.

Molly Wood 

Hahaha

Siddarth Shrikanth 

that are developing the products and services that we need to help change the way we use land. That's one piece of it, right? So there are lots of other pieces that are under it. need investors who are thinking about owning land and owning land better. So lots of land globally is managed by institutions. And so we need ways to transition that. Lots of land is owned by individual landowners, whether the local communities or kind of larger landowners. They need solutions. There are lots of, so if you think about real assets,

really important as well. There's a whole set of other investors are looking at projects. So how you get projects financed, whether it's through equity or debt or things like carbon finance. There are also investors beginning to look at how much larger companies in the public markets are interacting with nature, like integrating the risks to their value chains and some of the opportunities that might sit within those value chains to begin changing that. I always think there's, regardless of where you sit in the investment world, there, by the way,

There's also a whole range of blended finance investment strategies that people are building in specific geographies.

Molly Wood

What are, can you be more specific about just climate then and the kind of the thesis and the where the money comes from? Is it concessionary capital? Is it public? Like I know generation itself is sort of all over. Like you do a little bit of everything. What's just climate sort of specific model?

Siddarth Shrikanth

Yeah, I mean, the way we were set up, we were set up to bring institutions into the space. And by institutions, it's often pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, insurance companies, corporates to some extent. And again, that's a wide range, right? But of course, there'll be family offices in that mix, and there'll be all sorts of investors. But if you think about institutions, they're traditionally perceived as having the strongest kind

linked to fiduciary duty, right? So think of a pension fund. Ultimately, a pension fund exists to make sure that these pensioners, when they need their pensions, can receive their pensions. Most money, most investable capital today is in public hands. It's actually our money. I always keep remembering this. It's like, this money is the collective savings of individuals who

expect to be, obviously expect to live in a habitable world, this is really important. And at Generation we've done some recent work on the legal framework for impact to help make the case that this is absolutely sustainable to considerations or should be part of that fiduciary duty that institutions are under. But what we try and do is make the case, because often they have very rigorous investment.

decision-making processes. And they work with some of the largest asset managers and funds in the world. But they're also keen to innovate. And many of them are looking to find ways to drive their very large pools of capital into the solutions. So if you think that there's going two ways of investing your money, one is you're invested in sectors that need to transition. You can use your influence to help them transition.

Molly Wood 

Yep. Yep.

Siddarth Shrikanth

But the other piece, is what Just Climate, and this is to get specific, Just Climate helps those same institutions fund the solutions themselves. So we're not a transition finance. That's really important. It's a separate piece of work. And we're focused on the solutions providers, whether it's making green steel for the first time or, know, native restoration and scale for the first time. Those are things that need developing, and that's where we help.

Molly Wood

And then are you a matchmaker or are they your LPs and then you choose investments? They're your LPs. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, so it's much more traditional sort of. Okay, so they have said, we're gonna set aside this pool of capital because we think this is an opportunity slash we care. But it sounds like, it's not concessionary for them.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Derapeze. Exactly, so Derapeze. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Derapeze. Exactly. Yeah.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Yeah, it's not concessionary and the reason it's not concessionary is because you know...

Molly Wood

And like that feels like the part where you say we have to make the case. Like that feels like the, that's a case. got it, you know. And you're like, no, no, no, it's mangroves. Like talk about, know, talk about what it takes to make that case.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Yeah. And again, you have to and...

Siddarth Shrikanth

Well, I think it's a case that's been made and will be, I mean, will be working on this for a long time. There's plenty to do and it's not like this argument's obvious or has been won. Otherwise, everyone will be doing it, right? So it's, we need to be really humble about how much progress we can make individually and it's always in partnership with others who work in different places in Ultimately, the case we're making is simply that there are, if you're a thematic investor,

Molly Wood 

Yep. It's a hard job.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

and you focus on something, and you build a team with the specialized skills, whether it's we have scientists and engineers in the team and impact specialists and people who have worked on every bit of it, venture capital, growth capital, infra, policy, you put all those skills together because you need those skills to look at these business models that are not obvious if you're a general investor. And you do all the work, and then you align incentives long term so that we're incentivized to hit the highest impact.

hit the highest number possible through the capital we have, that should be attractive in the long term, is the case. The proof will be in the pudding. And so there's conviction around it, there's conviction around the pipeline and some of the opportunities we've seen.

We will need, we're tiny in comparison to, where, first of all, if you think about global institution investing, or even a single institution investor, a big pension fund could have like over a trillion dollars of assets. You know, we're a long way from that. But hopefully it encourages more innovation. And we try and share our work. We've certainly shared quite a lot on how we do our impact measurement, for example, with other us managers, because it helps them integrate impact in the same way.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

And then finally, before I let you go, I have to try to get examples to the extent that I can. Like you've talked about technologies for nature-based solutions and also business models. Give us some maybe technology examples. Let's start there that you're excited about.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Yeah, mean, technology is not a cure-all to everything, but it can be amazing in certain ways because it fundamentally, what it's doing is making things faster and cheaper, if it works well. Right? So there's lots of different things. So if you think about synthetic inputs into agriculture, so we've used fossil fuels to produce nitrogen that we then feed to plants to then feed ourselves, often indirectly.

Now, some of this technology is biotechnology. So it's applying nature's own technology, but scaling it up. And whether it's fertilizers or pesticides or herbicides, there's a whole wave of new products. And what they do is make it possible to use biology, scale up biology in some way. So you can replicate the microbes that fix nitrogen, or you can produce highly targeted pesticides.

Molly Wood 

Yep.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

But effectively, all of that is just better than the traditional alternative. So, with best-size today, we nuke the whole field. We kill everything. And then we also kill the thing that's causing us trouble. Terrible for soil biology, terrible for human health. And there are better ways. And so technology can help us create.

new models to grow food, for example. Totally different example. If you think about the way, mean, back to impact measurement, there are lots of ways we have measured nature in the past. I've done this myself. You walk around a forest with a clipboard and you count the number of species you see. You might do insect traps.

That technology is still technology, it's just really old technology and there are better ways. There are non-invasive ways. You can use satellites, you can use a whole range of other technology, whether it's bioacoustics, which is listening to the sounds of nature, you can take little samples of soil or water and sequence everything in there and then using that DNA, which is shed into the environment by every organism, figure out what's

There's, so again, in terms of measurement, there are some great technologies that are just way better than what humans can achieve. And of course, it's used in combination with ecologists who can interpret that data and make sense of it for whoever's using it. And to give you a final example, there's a huge amount of waste in the world, food waste, but also just general waste biomass all along the value chain. And part of it needs to be addressing demand.

Part of it is also when we have all this waste, what do do with it? And there are just lots of new technologies that can help us convert various biomass streams into fuels, for example, that could decarbonize high temperature heat or aviation or something else. There are certainly technologies that can help us then.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

food waste into higher value products, whether it's animal feed. In some cases, you can use it for carbon removal, so just storing carbon permanently. There's all this stuff we can do with biomass, which is fundamentally precious, right? It's photosynthetic output that a plant somewhere took, and then we did something with it, and wasting it feels like a real shame. And so without the right technologies, we do what we've been doing for a long time, which is essentially let it decompose very slowly in the landfill and release a of methane.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

Right?

Molly Wood 

And release a lot of methane. Yeah. Yeah.

Siddarth Shrikanth

It's terrible, but there are better ways. And so I think about all of those things is along the value chain, technologies can help us do things better and become more sustainable across the spectrum.

Molly Wood

And then what about business models when they are different from technology application?

Siddarth Shrikanth 

I think when business models as a kind of, sometimes you have both, the new business model and new technology. Sometimes it's just one of the two and they can still be really cool and interesting. So, give you one example. Agroforestry, which is simply growing food alongside forests or in forests. Really simple and there's lots of different ways to do it, but essentially it's integrating trees into productive agricultural systems.

That's not a technology. I mean, I would consider it technology in a sense, but it's not what you think of when you think of technology. Right. It's just trees. It's so obvious. The reason it's also just a really great climate solution because you create more resilient. If it's cocoa or coffee, for example, the shade creates resilience. So when it's too hot or too dry, you get production. The same thing, because the system as a whole can tolerate that heat stress or that water stress better.

So what we need there isn't new technology necessarily, it can help. But what we need is a business model that can take a good idea, which we've known is a good idea for tens of thousands of years, and actually make it happen. And make it happen at a range of different scales, whether it's really large scale all the way down to a small horde of farmers, because there have been lots of models that have been tried, and many of them have worked very well, but I think we've tried approach one, which is...

Molly Wood

Right.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

and I treat this as a philanthropic effort. And there are lots of amazing philanthropic initiatives across the world for aquiferistry, but we need a complimentary business model as well. individual land stewards can look at that and say, this is a way for me to protect nature, do good for climate and increase my income. It's worth remembering farming is a really hard job. And in most places, farmers don't make very much money.

And so if you can help them create, by business model, what I mean is just an economic model that's good for these landowners and land stewards, right? So what we need is business model innovation there. So we know that this can make more money, even in the current markets, without valuing the environmental services, the carbon, the biodiversity, and so on. know, cocoa prices almost, they went up 5x over the last couple of years.

Molly Wood

Wow.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

And that's because you had parallel disease, drought, yield losses in West Africa, a wave of, it's almost a perfect storm of climate risk hitting a single supply chain. Lots of people have been caught on the wires by that. So now companies are thinking, we should probably secure our cocoa supply for the next 10 or 15 years. It's a great moment to engage in that kind of business model innovation.

Molly Wood 

Interesting. So the business model innovation might there might be advanced purchase or, or credits or like it could be all kinds of things. could be fine. But fundamentally some financial mechanism that incentivizes this change in growing strategy. Yep.

Siddarth Shrikanth

I hope.

It could be all kinds of things.

Siddarth Shrikanth 

Exactly. often you need, same as with renewables, right? You often need a developer to go in and organize all of that. So if you think about production and offtake as the two ends of the spectrum, you need both. You need people working on both. You good operations. need someone buying the end product.

Molly Wood 

Off-taker. You need off-take. Yep.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Siddarth Shrikanth

But often you also need someone who can organize the whole supply chain, like get financing in place, train people, operate machinery if you need it, processing infrastructure, get it to market, trace it so you know the climate impact and nature impact across the board. These are things that in the renewables industry developers have done very well. And so they're not just a part of the furniture, they're just part of the industry and they do really good job. We need more of those in some of these commodity value chains, like cocoa and coffee as well.

Molly Wood

Yeah. Love it. So it is I could I could ask you a million more questions and I'm just going to make myself stop. So it is an investor at Just Climate and the book is called The Case for Nature. Please go read it. It's so interesting. Thanks so much for the time, Sid.

Siddarth Shrikanth

Thank you, Molly, really appreciate it.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

As it happens scientists and nature experts are fighting to release a first-of-its-kind report on the state of nature and biodiversity across the United States. Following on a UN report in 2019 that said global biodiversity is declining faster that an any time in human history.

The National Nature Assessment project in the U-S was canceled by the incoming Trump administration but scientists who worked on the effort recently told the New York Times that its findings are too important to bury. And that, as one put it “The dependence of the economy on nature, is understated and understudied and underappreciated.”

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

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