Episode 14 - Daniel Priestly: Let’s Leverage Billion Year Old Technology

So the thesis of Rebalance Earth is that nature is an undervalued asset and you're looking at it through the eyes of an asset manager.

Tell us a bit about that.

Yeah, so I think big picture, we hear all these stats about how half of our GDP or all of our GDP, our economy is underpinned by nature.

And I think people get it, but then they just go back to their day job and carry on.

And...

I was thinking, well, how do we make something an asset class? And when I worked at Reddington, we were early at getting pension funds to invest in offshore wind and solar panels.

Now, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, that was as crazy as investing in nature sounds now.

And 15 years later, it's almost become just a BAU activity.

Oh, we need to deploy another plant.

5, 10, 20, 50 gigawatts of offshore wind, let's do that.

And a big part of that was convincing pension funds that infrastructure and renewable infrastructure was an asset class.

Then it was saying, okay, well, if it is an asset class, we can sort of put it into our investment beliefs.

Then if we want to invest in it, we then need to go and appoint a fund manager, maybe Octopus Investments, who can then go and deploy that for us and manage the assets.

And really that was the idea and go, well, if Octopus Investments could do that for pension funds and offshore wind, why can't Rebalance Earth do that but for oyster reefs and catchment restorations and this idea that nature is living infrastructure? And that was the kind of the point.

And the big shift is that you can invest in nature already.

You can invest in nature as a commodity.

We cut oranges down for orange juice or we cut wood down for furniture.

What's different about our idea is that we want to let nature recover and be there forever.

like a road, like a railway, and we pay for the function it performs, cleaning water, storing water, protecting against flood and drought.

And then the clever bit is then, can I then get you to pay for that piece? And that has never been done before.

And that's the big idea.

It is a big idea because everyone expects nature to just do this for free.