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that you can hear me at the back I think this mics working in sensitive to my sound at least well welcome back to our series on planetary health i'm sam bickersteth and i lead the work of the planetary health economics council funded by the Rockefeller Foundation but based here at the Oxford Martin School and this is a seminar that we're doing jointly between our organizations if you've been here in the previous talks very nice see you back if you haven't seen them you've got to go online because they've all been brilliant but we started with the premise that human health human progress human well-being and welfare has spectacularly improved in the last 50 years but that has been at the expense of the systems on which the earth depends the natural capital and the systems that its producers and the goods and services that nature produces much of the growth in human wellbeing has has been drawn from that and we've shifted capital from one place to another from nature's capital to human and financial under built built environments in which we live and that hasn't all been bad but as we heard just last week from from Georgina Mason and in Indian embankment that's you know we need better ways to capture that value and and much as much has been done but a pretty early stage in integrating that and as we heard the week before from Myles Allen who presented the IPCC's special report on 1.5 degrees we know that we're taking some pretty major risks and a lot of those impacts are falling heavily on biodiversity and on water resources some spectacular impacts in the difference between going to 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees you would have seen in Martha's tour and if you haven't seen that really we all need to know those those alarming figures but I think the good news is there are organizations out there that are working on this in a pragmatic way they're not sitting in ivory towers but they're actually out in the field delivering change and trying to find solutions within the market space in which the global system works but also working working with governments and other organizations and that's the nature conservancy the TNC is a large organization as being practicing this for some time and it's a real pleasure to have Judy Baca Lettie here to talk to this topic of planetary health and and drawing on the experience that he's had personally about the experience of of his organization Julie is gonna be talking about banking on nature's assets so this interface between the market and the value and the value of the nature of nature okay I think we can think back to what we heard in the summer sort of perhaps more theoretical style about that valuation from from Georgina and Ian last week juniors the chief strategy officer of the Nature Conservancy the Nature Conservancy is very generous in its support to anomaly projects here in Oxford University and the president is also on the council of the planet rails economics pantry health economics council so there's lots of connections so it's a real pleasure Toby here Julia gulia I should say is a multi-talented person he's done lots of different things you'd actually climate scientist my backgrounds worked in financial markets and his passion and Laura's work has been around water resources valuation and the progress that has been achieved on that globally so Julia over to you we're very pleased to have you here thank you very much thank you [Applause] thank you very much thank you for coming it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invitation Rockefeller Foundation the Matthew school and Sam for your very generous and kind introduction let me start here is if I can work this so thanks Tanganyika it's one of the largest in fact the largest and oldest lakes in the world and it's a good place for us to start talking about the what I find at times elusive idea of planetary health I should warn you by the way this is relatively new territory for us as an organization but it is both fascinating and urgent and this place in particular has provided us with a really instructive starting point before I get to the problem banking natural assets which is the topic of our discussion tonight I wish to just frame the scope of the planet for health conversation at least as we are encountering it in in our work and I should say I don't intend to give a disciplinary definition here tonight for you I merely want to point out that the boundaries of what constitutes a planetary health concern encompasses a very broad and in fact broadening set of issues at the intersection of human well-being and the state of the planets environment well first we are here this is the greater Mahalo ecosystem it rises from the lake the lake tanganyika and covers about 4.8 million acres of land in its heart as you can see in this map is the Mojave National Park mahalia now Mountain National Park now from a biodiversity perspective this is a truly important place it is home to at least 82 mammal species and it is the only protected area in the world that hosts both chimp and Savannah elephants in fact more than 90% of the chimpanzees of Tanzania sit in this in this particular protected area it is also a very special place from a freshwater perspective it is home to more than 250 endemic fish species this is rather special ecosystem and none of these pieces have evolved here in essentially total isolation for many millions of years maybe up to ten million years right so this is the story of the environment of this particular place what about health now if one is to speak about social systems of course context matters in the 60s I'll tell you this there's one piece of a story in the sixties of the villages ation of president Peres was called the Ujamaa movement really shaped what we see today it was an effort to collectivise means of production in the 60s and 70s and then after that in the eighties this National Park I was talking about earlier was added and as a result the population was pushed from the forests people like the 20 people for example were pushed on forests into these villages along the along the coast if good planetary health is the presence of an underlying ecological infrastructure that is in some sense right sized and managed to the needs of the population and they can sustainably contribute to the well-being of the people that live on it then this is an emblematic example of what happens when that is not in fact available demographics has probably been the central symptom of this particular challenge over the last 30 years between 1988 and 2002 the number of people in the region doubled to 1.6 million now there was a time when you might have thought that this growth was maybe attributable to incoming refugees particularly from the DRC from the Democratic Republic Congo and from Burundi but the fact the matter is that in 2012 the last census once most of these refugees have been repatriated you still have more people who still have 2.1 million people living in this particular in this particular place so Malthus would have recognized this situation - illiterates cause 28.4 children high infant mortality rates extreme poverty Malthusian trap is essentially set of course endemic malaria poor water and sanitation conditions no access to family planning limited to no clinics unstopped dispensaries and a variety of other drivers are in fact the boundary conditions that over determine the outcome in this particular place now this is a population with extremely limited natural resources compared to its size at me and yet entirely dependent on its environment for basic livelihood one of the economic engines of the era is this is the certein like fish called tiger the fish are caught at night and then dried and sold the fishing is profitable but it's seasonal the problem of course is that with that many people the resources are in fact over exploited as a result there are very few full-time fishes rather most people are farmers who fish which means that as the Fisheries take the brunt of the pressure and collapse then of course the landscape is immediately behind that this excess of resource of extraction health insecurity and poverty results in remarkable and intended consequences because malaria is so endemic in fact four out of five of households have someone suffering from the disease at any given time the needs are very cute the disease is the principal driver indebtedness as families trying to meet the need for medical support so it's not surprising that malaria bed nets for example would be a good idea under the circumstances but because of the contextual resource constraint as soon as the bed nets arrive rather than being used to protect all family members from malaria they end up getting used as ring nets to catch fish and on top of the over extraction of the sardines this creates severe ecological problems these nets are sufficiently tides that they catch also many juvenile pelagic species of that endemic set that I was talking about at the beginning that makes Tanganyika so special because they get caught before they can breathe this unintended consequence also accidentally contributes to the collapse of a number of ecologic important stock few cases in my view give a better sense of what it means for the health of both individuals and societies to depend on flourishing natural systems it seems to me played the obvious that you simply cannot imagine solving resource issues in this context without engaging the health community and vice-versa you cannot hope to effectively address health issues without thinking about resource management this in my view is the archetype planetary health problem but if these most vulnerable rural communities are obviously dependent in a very real and direct way on the environment there are many more who are just one major problem away from suffering the exact same problem for example my colleague had the talus whose work has been instrumental in getting us to think about planetary health has been collaborating with the Center for Global Development and brac to try and figure out the following problem as you might have seen in the news over the last few months Cox is brought bazaar in Bangladesh with this is a picture that is now host to over 1 million displaced Rohingya people who fled Myanmar in humanitarian agencies displaced people rely on their surrounding environment for survival the environment becomes a social food water shelter of energy livelihood as well as a highly politicized space because the landscape is so vital to these displaced people at the great environment may increase vulnerability in very obvious ways and typically refugees settle in already marginalized and fragile states for example there is a monsoon season which hit this part of the world exacerbated environmental challenges for the people in camps the erosion of soil impacted water resources making this settlement much much more susceptible to disease outbreaks fuel what is the primary source of energy for all Rohingya people in that camp and it's also the source of energy for 80% of the surrounding host community so as a result the form of the forest gets harvested very aggressively as the first station that answers fuel would become scarce so to the point that now it's fair to say it's probably the top reason of tension between refugee and community leave this to say there have been efforts to reforest mostly to stabilize the slopes in face of monsoon but also trying to replenish maybe the fuel world in the long run and fortunately and non-natives pieces are often being used which has made these plantings highly susceptible to cyclone damage because they affect man adapted to the type of climate that this this place faces and then in a funny final of tragic irony human wildlife conflict is also concerned the row hinga happened to have settled in an area that serves as an elephant corridor confrontations have killed north of a dozen people since last September as a result of that if you think this is a interesting but ultimately small problem in the context of a planetary health discussion you would be quite wrong around the world every day more than 20,000 people are uprooted from their homes in conflict violence persecution and so forth over 65 million people that is placed globally you can see this here if you exclude the asylum seekers you have about 25 million people that are crossing borders another 40 million that I internally displaced within their own nations these are people that may well live first time the challenge of sustaining planetary health force this paper is not just a big problem in terms of numbers of people it's also a long-term problem leverage refugee you've spent 10 years away from home and for many this average increases to over 20 years so the scope of the planetary health question can be expended to this and can be extended also to natural catastrophes of course for example Khurrana in India you will have seen this between 15th and 20th of August of this year they've been unusually high rainfall during the monsoon season which flooded southwestern southwestern states in India the floods killed more than I think 350 people and left some 200,000 people homeless and very quickly environmental crisis can turn into a public health crisis yet in part the solution or rather the prevention of this particular problem lies in the management of both the river and the ecosystems that surround the infrastructure and even the richest parts of the world are not immune to these types of issues there are some examples again just from this year Japan July 3rd to 8th an extrordinary downpour poured water on the south of Japan more than on the records of the Meteorological Agency is one of the most heavily engineered and managed landscapes on the planet and yet it was completely overwhelmed the resulting flood killed about 200 people and 8 million people were advised to evacuate about 23 prefectures I'll shall Adam Italian just a couple of weeks ago we lost about a million cubic meters of what in the north of Italy because of massive massive winds and then similarly catastrophic down pours and then of course it's in the news for I should mention it California this path of November the now infamous campfire breaks out and this is Northern California the fire causes unknown at the moment but it burned through around a hundred thousand acres of land so far the deaths all went northward of 70 people and close to a thousand are still I think I can unaccounted for there was in fact a similar fire was a fire happening at the same time in Southern California these types of catastrophic fires of course have impacts on property and lives but they also have impacts on broader health indicators as the winds changed and became northerly winds last week last Thursday actually San Francisco ranked worst in the world on air pollution ahead of Delhi and Lahore with these examples I don't wanna imply that managing planetary health means achieving a world without catastrophes that's not the point but unusual boundary conditions and an expected fire or unusual amount of rain or refugees are mediated by the landscape it is the interaction of society with those landscapes that ultimately frames in my view of the planetary health problem so now that we have your sense of the types of issues that we are encountering around the world in which there seems to be value to think about a planetary health framework let me take a big big step back and indeed look at the whole planet for a second before I get to the investment story now we're a science-based organization we have about 600 scientists on staff amongst our 4,000 and per year so we had to ask ourselves the following question what does it look like if we get this right what does it look like forget this right is it even possible to reconcile our aspirations of growth and development with the health and nutrition of nine billion people without losing without losing the ecosystem integrity we depend on in the long run so a team stands yes to get led by our Heather tallies conducted a study to answer this very question if you're interested it was just now published in frontiers in ecology and the environment the research was based on a plausible set of assumptions let's say about how the world will change between now and 2050 population growth 10 billion people economies grow minions are presumably lifted out of poverty and therefore demands for food water energy increase accordingly we they're assumed that we would follow our decarbonization scenario consistent with limiting the global mean temperature increase to one point six degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 that would be for those who have interested in this IPCC representative concentration pathway to 2.6 RPC 2.6 we then explicitly and I think that's important we explicitly modeled what the future could look like if we follow the business-as-usual path or the Sicilian path in meeting these demands and one of the most important aspects of this study was that we took some pains to do this in a specially explicit way we asked the questions where things would actually happen if the world change is how and where food and energy are produced we can then ask the question what it looks like from a landscape perspective to meet a doubling in food and energy demands while achieving that habitat protection and in general the story is rather for positive first as a conservationist you might find our sustainability scenario quite appealing under that scenario there is no additional conversion of natural habitats half a billion Hector's more natural habitats retains compared to business as usual with the exception of the temperate grassland biomes all global biomes remain natural habitat for more than half of their extent in this scenario now temperate grasslands if you're wondering unfortunately have already lost almost half of their extent have already lost it by 2005 and so those we can't we cannot save in the same way so this should be particularly attractive to those who worry about the half earth about protecting half terrestrial ecosystems now in truth there are a number of caveats to this picture other factors and effects fragmentation endemicity the impacts of climate change habitat degradation will give us very different results on the quality of conservation but at least there's a start right you can actually conserve almost half of the biomes and from a health perspective not surprisingly sustainable sustainability scenario is also quite appealing this is a picture of air quality in the middle income and high in countries in both scenarios we end up with relatively better air quality in 2050 because of essentially that option of emission technology emission control technology but in the business-as-usual case air pollution in multiple African nations Brazilian Indian worsen and the worsen because of increased fossil fuel use and population growth in those regions so under this scenario the BAU scenario you'd end up in 2050 with about four point nine billion people with worse air quality than you had in 2010 instead under the sustainability scenario air pollution exposure would be massively reduced you'd end up with about 700 million people that's a lot of people but it's significantly less than you'd have in the BAU scenario 700 million people expected to live in areas with lower air quality now I don't want to be Pollyannish about any of this the paper is not some secret math about all of this how all this can happen so go for that but it does show that there is no biophysical reason there's no above the reason why we could not do this sustainably in other words the biophysical limits of a finite planet by themselves are not a constraint on most sustainable development of meeting the aspirations of growth and the aspiration of stability these are not in fact internally inconsistent obviously achieving something resembling sustainability scenario would be incredibly ambitious now and describe the broadband days of what the planetary health space looks like from where I'm sitting and this you can think of as our North Star in a sense what are we aiming for what's the world that we're trying to achieve so now's the time to actually honor the title of his talk and talk a bit about finance and natural assets and where they fit in this picture but that I have to actually tell you a little bit about the nature conservancy so nature's service see through its history has achieved results mostly through innovative transaction based structures where was fishing quota acquisitions it was debt restructuring new market tax credits and others and all of these done typically with the local communities we started with land acquisition I mean those of course financing was a central protection strategy for us this example here have a picture of 1955 is when we did our first ever deal this was a 60 acre purchase along the Manas River Gorge which is on the board of New York in Connecticut the Conservancy provided about 7,000 so I think 7,500 US dollars at the time was a fairly significant amount of money to finance the purchase with the provision that the loan be repaid so that it could use could be used in other conservation efforts later on that first deal helped us set up a revolving loan fund which became what we call the land preservation fund which is still one of the organization's principal conservation tools over the subsequent 60 years TNC protected over a hundred and ten million acres of land this way that's more than the size of France because we're looking for an orientation but we are have expanded significantly across 70 countries and working on both terrestrial freshwater and marine ecosystems and with a variety of tools the point is that we strive to do big deals that make a difference to the problems we're trying to solve and for that we need to get creative with the mechanics of those deals the way in which they actually happen and the scale inevitably needs to be substantial and often they are I'll give you just a couple of examples to set the expectations you know about what kind of solutions are what kind of scale we might be talking about here when we talk about planetary health interventions so this beautiful place is the Great Bear forest in mid-2000 we were invited by local communities to join the efforts to save the Great Bear forest which is along the west coast of Canada we helped establish a 120 million coast fund divided between essentially environmental conservation there was a sinking fund for investments in economic development the coast funds linked sustainable development community well-being of the First Nations and the permanent conservation of the Great Bear Rainforest ecosystem on February the 1st 2016 happily the final Great Bear Rainforest agreement was signed between the First Nations and the British Columbia government which permanently conserves 19 million acres of Pacific coast between Vancouver Island and the South East Alaska and about nine million acres of those are completely off-limits from logging with a balanced managed and the some of the world's most stringent harvest standards another example just to again give you a sense of scale 2014 we set up what we call the Great Western checkerboard project to help conserve the ecological integrity of a hundred and sixty six thousand acres of forests rivers while that habitat in the eastern Cascade Mountains of Washington and then in the Blackfoot River Valley in in Montana the Conservancy used interim financing to acquire the lands from a timber company and this was about 130 million dollars worth of acquisition and this project stitches together important negatory corridors in both Montana and Washington that then link up to Canada these places are among the largest and most ecologically important tracts of private land in the crown of the content that's what the air is called and the project is a hub for a grizzly bear for Lynx for wolves whose survival depends on having enough space to roam and and and move along at the checkerboards name is obviously comes from the structure of the land distribution which is the result of the private development of those lands about 100 150 years ago or in 2060 last example I'll give you in the Seychelles the Seychelles completely the debt for nature conversion with the nature conservancy the deal raised funds to buy Seychelles sovereign debt which was at the time held by European countries mostly the UK and France to refinance it under more favourable terms in return a portion of repayments will be redirected to fund climate change adaptation sustainable fisheries and marine conservation the financing promotes it the implementation of a marine spatial plan for the entire shells exclusive exclusive economic zone which is the thing included in that black line on the map this is a territory or rather a seascape seascape that's three thousand times the landmass of the Seychelles it announced about four hundred thousand kilometers squared that's 99 million acres so it's bigger than the size of of Germany my point with all of these examples are and I hope you'll you'll hear this is that it is not inconceivable to achieve big landscape scale successes and often these can be achieved through the careful use of finance and financial engineering these examples therefore should give us some hope that one could aspire to put the tangible dent into the planetary health issues I was describing at the very beginning of this discussion however when it comes to planetary health issues the problem is not so much the financial engineering what is proven difficult is to convince society all of us to that your own health and recognize how the environment defined as the landscape we inhabit is a functionally affected part of our security infrastructure how the environment is a functionally effective part of our security infrastructure the sceptics amongst you presumed rock-solid there may be a lot of the UNAM you might be forgiven to thinking that if this were so plainly obvious it was so obvious that investing in nature is such a deterministic way of improving the human condition why would we have needed the last several decades of efforts from Rio onwards to try and mobilize the brawler policy around this after all isn't environmental condition state of the environment an externality a cost to some benefit to others but in either case where there's a cost benefit isn't it just unpriced byproducts of some other intervention someone is painful if that is the case if indeed environmental condition the condition of the environment is simply a byproduct of the consumption or production of goods or services then we ought to be having a conversation about regulatory intervention about pricing that externality and indeed don't get me wrong a lot of environmental work maybe most of it is fundamentally about that problem and it certainly is one way to think about integrating the world of human development and health and environmental management but the fact of the matter is that what we strive to do that there are a lot of institutional practical reasons which we live every day why organize in action around tangible credible cash flows that might exist today makes a whole lot of difference to achieve a real impact at scale I need be clear I hope you'll hear this as well not all value is expressed in terms of what can be exchanged for money that's not what I'm saying just like we don't necessarily pay through terrace the full value to us of having a functioning sewer system consumer surplus far exceeds what is captured by the transactions but the question remains of whether the value that is available in exchange is sufficient to achieve the outcome we're seeking and support it's financing where does the social value for conservation and for improving the condition of nature come from if we answer that question if we can identify sources of value in exchange that exists today which can pay for environmental outcomes that have a public health implication then you have the premise for an investment and possibly the basis for the definition of an assets in a financial sense so if we leave aside the question which is an important question of reframing value from what it is to what we'd like it to be and we stick to what is available now it turns out there are still a number of opportunities to mobilize resources to achieve multiple objectives that are consistent with the plan is very healthy framing and I hope the resume talk will be about hopefully demonstrating some of these early examples now one option maybe the most obvious is if an appropriately managed natural acet becomes a substitute of some other existing solution to deliver public health outcomes that someone is in fact already paying for that is if you can invest in nature instead of some other technical solution right in that world the social values that already exists whatever society was going to pay for solution a can be better achieved with social be right that is not the only option by the way but I will focus on that for the rest of my remarks one of the obvious places to start is in fact the water sector what our utilities are first and foremost public health interventions and we pay for them today directly through tariffs and indirectly through taxes a lot of money actually worldwide average expenditures in the water sector around half a trillion dollars a year as both capital and operating expenditures but utilities are also man-made systems of landscape into a mediation they are natural monopolies in which we as a society decide how to occupy modify the landscape to achieve a public good the for public in common value of our utility is hardly reflected in the marginal tariffs and Taxation that are used to operate them but nevertheless unless they're perpetually bankrupt which can happen if in fact they represent a tangible value pool that can pay for a very specific service and therefore support investment it is worth pointing out by the way that when we talk about paying for what we're actually paying water the resource what we're paying for through the utility is water security the social outcome and we know that there is in fact some degree of substitution possible in water today this is a map of New York City the water city of New York which probably represents the most famous example of this of some of you many of you may be ill will have heard about this before Europe draws its waters from a protected set of reservoirs upstate in the Catskills and Delaware it gravity feeds these water resources into the city with relatively limited filtration because of the purity of the water the environmental regulator groans the DP that apartment very mental protection which operates the utility is also the asset owner what's called a filtration avoidance determination which means that the protection of the landscape protection of the landscape is sufficient to meet the statutory responsibilities all the utilities was the public this is granted in exchange for a commitment to continued program of land acquisition and management to limit human activities in the watershed okay the substitution is often advertised if we all did not have that system of protected reservoirs it would have to build a ten billion dollar treatment works a massive massive capital expenditure for the city and note this it is in fact a bankable natural asset because the asset in question is in fact land ownership the DP buys the latter a fair market price through a fund the city has instituted which is an effect in the capital accounts of the city and that is in turn financed through the municipal bond market so effectively this is in fact an existing natural asset underwritten by a senior obligation now for those of you who follow the water sector this is not hugely dissimilar from having the watershed activities of the UK PLC's here the water utilities being included in the pricing review of the economic regulator offered now you if you know this example you might counter well there are many things that are unusual about the New York setup first it is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world which happens to be served by this forested space the tax base of a city of this kind and the wealth of a city of his kind gives it in fact a lot of options think about this the acquisition program of the DP for land is on the order of a few hundred million dollars their capital annual capital budget for capital expenditures is on the order of one to two billion dollars per year second there is a bit of an accident of history in how this particular server happened the relationship between the rural community in the Catskills and the city was fraught for much of the 20th century as the wealthy urban center went in and bought up land waters in the in the rural areas and this also of course constrains the development of the rural community this was resolved in the mid 90s with what's called a watershed memorandum of agreement which bound the city the state of the local watershed communities into a plan for the future but it's a kind of complicated path dependence arc that takes us to this particular solution and then third this isn't actually not exactly a conservation effort in a strict biological sense in many ways this is a landscaped environment more than a planetary health intervention it certainly looks very beautiful and it is in fact functional in many ways certainly in terms of ecosystem services it provides but these are in fact artificial reservoirs so the primary environmental intervention is simply the axis of development around them yeah nevertheless the example of New York has inspired the idea that maybe maybe the water sector could be a vehicle through which this idea of planetary health could be turned into investable bankable projects within a within an existing economic and financial framework which is that of the audience right so we're making some progress on that idea let me tell you a story from New Mexico there is a largely because the runs along most of Rocky Mountains from New Mexico and Arizona to Colorado and up into Montana and British Columbia it is the large ponderosa pine forest of Rocky Mountains the ponderosa pine the penis Ponderosa is a native species in the US and Canada is one of the most common in America the forest management practices that a dominant here have resulted in a highly highly dense forest mostly because of encouraged suppression and prevention the idea of increasing forest reserves and for safety but it is extremely an unnaturally dense and it's also very very dry since the 90s New Mexico has suffered a significant increase in temperature about two degrees in average in some years up to four degrees compared by average so by 2005 this forest had largely dried out and what was once a very robust source of timber as I said she turned into a very robust source of for the next fire now there are two very significant cities in the story that's the watershed of the Rio Grande and their Santa Fe which is at the top they're just under a hundred thousand people in Albuquerque which has about half a million people then on the 26th of June 2011 at about 1:00 p.m. local time at a place called las conchas which is near los alamos a tree fell on a power line it almost immediately ignited a severe wildfire and because of the winds the fire began to spread at a rate of an acre per second an acre per second within the first day it had burned 43,000 acres within a week it had burned 150 thousand acres because of the density of the fuel wood the temperature this is actual fire was extremely hot in some areas the fire was so hot that the soil vaporized okay this wildfire became known as less conscious wildfire the largest wildfire that New Mexico ever had to that date would have been extraordinary except that the following year the White Water Baldy complex fire ended up having the dubious privilege of taking that title having destroyed 250,000 acres of land in the south of New Mexico but back to the sculptures this is what was left behind only ash but that was not the end of a story because about six weeks later starting on August 21st to pre normal storms happened rain comes down and it starts dragging down what you see in this video which is that debris in the ash that had been left behind by the wildfire and makes it into the Rio Grande this is at the beginning actually a few minutes later you'll see it getting worse it got so bad at one point that is two story building God's covered by this this event in the end I can get few here in the end we ended up with this which is a 21 meter deep sediment plug in one of the Rio Grande tributaries and of course this disaster was not just a forestry disaster downstream from the site of the fire there was one of the principal reservoirs of the water system of New Mexico so that's what it looked like and at this point it's and that's where it was situated so it's important for you to see where this problem happened and so just plug at the map on the on the left there what are from New Mexico cities santa fe and albuquerque down there comes from the coke from Colorado down the Rio Grande which is that line there then Santa Fe pipes water from the river to the city up at the very northwest of the states up at the very top there is the San Juan Chama would a project which channels additional water through to the Chama River and down in attribute of the Rio Grande and then all the way down to Albuquerque so you can see what happened this fire did not just happen anywhere it happened right at the heart of the utility system of the states and the utility system here is not simply the infrastructure that was built in proximity of the cities it is the integrated system that comprises both the built infrastructure and the function of the watershed and of course the results shows up in the public sphere because this is what comes out of your tap in Albuquerque if that happens the treatment works of Albuquerque were overwhelmed over forty days this is the quality of the water that came out of that system under these conditions the flooding event was declared a federal disaster so this is another good example of how conservation can become a substitute for extremely expensive interventions downstream and in this case it's infected in ecological restoration our chapter locally in New Mexico Scripps has been working with this we know where to target we want to restore the forest to look like this and we also know that this work represents a positive return on investment for example we examined two scenarios impacted in Taos County in New Mexico we found that in both the cost of doing the treatment is actually far lower than the actual benefit that comes from having it done in case of wildfires so this is the case of investment in principle the challenge is then how to turn this this insight into operator it's essentially operation work into the landscape into something that's investable it's an investable proposition and there are no complex challenges here probably the most important is that is the land ownership structure consider just a land distribution here's a map of the land ownership structure in the area grant it requires working with dozens of partners we actually have more than 50 more than 50 partners here from federal entities counties cities districts and so forth drawn and like the case of the DP by the way I should point out Albuquerque cannot afford to buy itself the Rio Grande right and so there's a question of how you actually set yourself up and this is where we developed the idea of a water fund which is essentially a vehicle to finance and govern the problem connecting the downstream beneficiaries to the upstream providers awarding the portion they are a governance mechanism they act as a Secretariat for planning and processing interventions in the watershed they are funding vehicle where'd a stream user can pay for upstream protection and finally the if I have a watershed conservation program on the ground now I don't have a lot of time to tell you a lot more about the detail of this today but we are trying to figure out how to then capitalize and make these happen at scale and incidentally one of the places this might work sooner than we expected his cape town because you might have heard the Cape Town ran against this zero day zero problem the city would force to attack the water this is the result of severe and their investments in infrastructure and the severe drought well it turns out that invasive species in the watershed drink about two months of water per year in Cape Town and so this is an obvious way in which you could we could solve some of these problems we have more than 35 such water funds across 12 countries in various stages of implementation and we are in fact quite confident that the opportunity for payments is around 48 to 50 billion dollars a year famous free customs services and so the question and by the way already 24 of those billion are being paid although they're mostly national programs and direct transfers rather than payments for investment if that expenditure was finished as part of a utility capital program it would represent about seven or eight percent of the total worldwide expenditure for water which is actually comparable to what the city of New York spends on its Catskills watershed so because Sam is looking at me very honestly I'll speed up some of the things I was gonna say here but let me say just a couple of other things one you might be thinking gosh this guy sounds like it's very interested in utilities the fact the matter is that if you map out the targets of the commercial biological diversity and you say where do those targets overlap with these watersheds that we could protect for the purposes of providing clean water well it turns out that an additional forty four countries could meet their CBD 2020 targets if they protected these watersheds that happen to also then protect the source water so this is a very material way of achieving both health outcomes as well as environmental outcomes just to whet your appetite we're not doing this only with utilities and water provision we're doing this storm water I don't have time to talk to you about this today but we are investing in similar ideas where you have effects of substitution where nature is the option B that gives you a better answer for the same solutions option a we are starting to look at this in air pollution we have a control trial running right now in Louisville Kentucky which is what this picture is about trying to plant trees and detect the impacts on the health over 700 participants in a three-year long survey to try and understand whether create an ecosystem in a city could actually be a substitute from downstream health interventions that are required and then lastly another example if you're interested in this come to speak to me is the application of this for protection along coasts we're doing the same this is a Mexican thing cool turns out the Mesoamerican Reef is actually very effective at protecting parts of the coast from from typhoon so we've created a financing mechanism with an insurance policy with Swiss tree to try and optimize the deployment careful against that okay with this massive acceleration in mind let me conclude happily I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm sitting here telling you that everything will be solved by capital markets on the private sector it won't and I'm not even we were able to mobilize private capital at scale as we've unfortunately in over the last few years private debt is often public debt in waiting particularly if it is a contingent liability hidden in the assets that are susceptible to investment from the private sector our assumptions about future value creation which may not come to fruition and there's always going to be some underlying public choice about the landscape and that is ultimately what the government and taxpayer tend to be on the hook for in the end all these activities have an underwriter of last resort in the public because all these things happen somewhere and we're making policy choices about where they happen and a key an answered question one that may be interesting from a research perspective is what has the fact the actual underwriting capacity of the public sector that needs to be mobilized to make some of these things happen but I hope have convinced you that there are in fact mechanisms available today to get going in some degree of scale on this question of planetary health so I'll take you enclosing back to Tanganyika is the village of Mahalo the ridge Conservancy here worked with Pathfinder international to develop integrated projects that attempt to simultaneously address population health and environmental issues the project actually is named tun Ghana which means let's uniting kiswahili and it's actually being quite extraordinary we've recruited trainers for classic extension service trainers 100 volunteers whoever now are not just trained in community health family planning sanitation so forth but also in the benefits of crop rotation in ponds of trees sustainable fishing and so forth we've integrated all of these and you know usually happens in household level we've recruited about 10% of the households as model household and these people integrate not just good hygiene practice and Family Planning as in a traditional health intervention but also sustainable resource use and the results have been quite encouraging on top of the health outcomes for 17,000 people have had access to family planning as we started the photographer Tilly T rate has dropped from 8.4 to 7 we've also had impact on the resources we've had Beach management users units that we will to enforce bans of those mosquito nets and that has reduced dramatically the impact now the the banning of the fishing of course there means the people transition to the landscape and you might expect then oh my god that's going to be a disaster for the landscape but it turns out whilst median land holding increased from 3 to 4 acres roughly only 2 percent came from clearing bush of forest land and that's because we've used all the interventions like village land use planning land reserves deployment of village force councils of what zone to really sensitize people to the management of the natural resource and it worked we did a census of sympathy in the protected area where she's one of the key wildlife human competition and it turns out the numbers of stable and in a recent survey people in the village said that the forests were now better protected and regulated so the Nature Conservancy inhabits a world of praxis of practical problems we have people trying to get work done in the world and well I hope these examples of him you tonight some sense of the reason why you think there's some good opportunities for nature to be part of a long term approach to health much much for me to be figured out a lot of the questions that come out of this vastly under theorized and will require a smart people in universities to think about but I think there are some reasons to be very cautiously optimistic about the potential to convert into plan as your health agenda against which we might be able to mobilize significant capital at scale hopefully to make a difference to people in nature thank you very much [Applause] see that was fantastic wonderful photographs as well but incredible scope in your talk and I'm sure you've all got many questions I suppose I want us to be relatively optimistic because that's where you started so there may be some queries and some clarifications but I hope people can be can take your tenor of can-do optimism which you nicely end with we could just go to the pub but if you want to stay for a bit we can have we can have 15 minutes of questions so are there any questions Julian got one here so Tommy you gonna get the microphone first as we're live-streaming this it's helpful for you to use the microphone say who you are please so tom Penkovsky and the field student department in ethology so as you've kind of highlighted in your talk thank you for the talk it's very interesting you've highlighted in the talk many of these links between ecosystems and human health are local and context specific planetary health is interested in you know trans boundary and international issues how scalable are these solutions i it's a great question I'm well we speak about the one I spoke most which is the water fund example the use of ecosystem services to to solve a water security problem whilst protecting an environmental asset and those are we believe are actually quite scalable in part because it's interesting the set up mostly depends on the relationship wi hin the city and the watershed and that's more similar across nations than nations are similar to each other and so it turns out that if you organize an intervention around the so power the centralizing power of a city then you can actually scale quite a bit now we've scaled in the sense that we've replicated some 30-plus times which is significant but still tiny in compared to what we tried we're trying we think that there are about a thousand cities around the world above a hundred thousand people who that could protect their watershed in some appropriate sense and come out financially better and so that the protection of the watershed is a cost-effective way of delivering water security so how people is six hundred million people worldwide and so you know if we achieve that it'll be scalable but as ever in conservation I'll let you know when we get there you know that's the only proof is having done it any of those thousand city's going to involve the negotiations across national territory so sovereign board because I think that's it's more challenging than it is some will I'm a big fan of standing where you can so I mean I think that it shouldn't discount the fact that you can get to a lot of these places without worrying about traditional issues and transnational issues obviously water funds on the Indus will be a significantly more complicated thing to pull off than what a fund the Rio Grande that said I think they build on a tradition in terms binary kind of negotiations which is that the practice is far more advanced than the theory it turns out that one we expect theoretically cultural things that actually they're in practice don't happen and people do find common ground the whole purpose of these types of water funds are creating a table for negotiation based on facts have given people the same set of kind of factual information so I think I you know we haven't done a trans boundary one let's put it that way but I'm optimistic thank you yes hi there Rebecca Peters with the school of geography and environment I've had the good fortune to work at the Nature Conservancy as the contractors I've seen some of the projects from the a smaller scale but it'd be interesting to hear more about how the Nature Conservancy approaches its role as a leader and particularly how it builds coalitions with unwilling actors with great difficulty who would say well I think I mean one of the one I I think one of the core competencies of the organization one of the competencies that we invest in the most is the stakeholder engagement right because all of these as you saw in the example and you mix well this is true across the world are you know when you're trying to kind of solve extensive problems that are spatial you end up with negotiations across many many people interests you know kind of the very very rarely full subsidiarity principal operate so you have multiple actors or multiple levels and so you have to kind of develop a skill we tend to think that you know science is helpful because it has an institutional value that's transcends most nations and so you're bringing science to the table mapping and by science I mean evidence I mean you know it's not just a scientific perspective or the evidence is important may be critical component to bring people to the table the other thing is that I think you it is a negotiation so you have to go into these things understanding everybody's interests and our experience in the United States and across the world is that we'd even do work across the political spectrum across the interested spectrum and and we we succeed when we bring science to bear Hana's at the back of the room holding a microphone must be some questions that hi I'm Jill Shankman I'm a local resident just sort of trying to understand your approach because it involves us of mind shift so thinking about somewhere like Oxford part of the Thames Valley so we have one water utility bills constantly rising for users company has incredible problems getting any agreement to build new reservoirs we have a crumbling infrastructure sort of full of leaks how do you start thinking about approaching a system like that yeah from a quite different quite different perspective you're suggesting it's a great question and I do think actually the UK both England and Wales in particular are a incredibly valuable laboratory because they leave a site that to any judgement about the privatization and the fact that we have PLC's to start with it so happens that then is very it's quite transparent because they have to in all the capital programs have to be reviewed by the same economic regulator and so in fact I think and I think the Environment Agency also believes that there is in fact quite a lot of opportunity in sort of natural infrastructure that the Devils in the details because what is natural here is an interesting question and I would submit that all companies in the UK are in fact already spending quite a bit of money their operating budgets for environmentally you see approved activities of the watershed I think I assume I'll say this is an opinion I don't know it for a fact that I suspect it's not optimized they don't treat those expenditures as capitalized expenditures they are an operating expenditure there are cost attacks that they have to spend what I'd like to do is to see natural infrastructure be built into the regulated asset base so instead on their cost curve of capital expenditures before the abdomen reservoir there should be other pieces of infrastructure that are green grow and you can do other things on let's take both these hi my name is Alex I'm also in zoology I work in the nature based solutions initiative I was wondering if you could shed some light on these water funds and their operationalization specifically how I suppose they are to international markets the title banking I thought you're gonna talk white a bit about finance or financial firms and the finance industry is very interested in this but it tends to show up through insurance you did kind of mention insurance what's your kind of views on on the idea of using insurance as a instrument not just to insure but to discipline people and get people to do investments because you know cause the insurance premiums down and there's a whole sort of set of models you mentioned yeah just your views whether you think that's a panacea or overhyped or whatever thank you right so on the internationalization you know the ceiling for exposure to international markets is the exposure - max of water sector which is not very high so if you think of this as a solution adopted in the water sector the water sector is not a hugely globalised sector to start with and so it's you know in some sense relatively low that said if you're buying yourself the Freedom Works you're going to speak to a number of norm suppliers most likely and so I think that there's an argument to say that in our perfect world this would be one of the things you might be able to buy especially is what is it are you buying what you're buying is a plan for a watershed a process of stakeholder engagement you're buying a security of a contract between different pay payers and so that's the what we need to kind of in a way project size right so that's what we're trying to do it create enough track record on these board of funds so that people start recognised in there everywhere in the world so we're at the beginning of that journey but that's what we're trying to learn we're trying to collaborate the treaties like Veolia and others who have an international reach to try and make this happen elsewhere in terms of the financial sector I mean insurance specifically you know as a a certainly not a panacea it's we are working with issuers we're working with reinsurers Swiss three as I said and they certainly there are some cases particularly when you're dealing with these contingent liabilities like a six I don't happening where you know there is a lot of inefficiency where the risk is apportioned and the insurance product can improve that I'll make a broader point which I care a lot about sometimes people think oh these old finance stuff is you know are you selling out nature or the fact that there is a finance aside from the question of who owns what finances are discipline has proven to be an incredibly valuable instrument for us because it asks very hard questions about where returns come from what exactly is it that you're trying to do how much does it cost and it's not not everything is susceptible to the type of analysis certainly R&D isn't but because we're trying to scale it's a very useful frame of analysis because it helps it be very disciplined about what it would take to get to scale in the current economic systems so as an audience you've been really nice to Julia about this and I'd be so answered the question about the financialization of of nature but I think you're from side business school aren't you so you're gonna be on the side of them of the finance years at all and still in academics sorry yes I love the idea of you know thinking of the interest the investment as a capitalized expenditure which can then go on a balance sheet the puzzle that we are tackling with is on whose balance sheet can it become an asset I mean like sure we can interpret it as a project level boundary and therefore collectively owned and I mean it gets hazy at that stage for us yeah so like everything in the landscape you know you end up the money goes into a bunch of operations and an illiquid asset and so it you know it's not very credit worthy and so I you know where this is starting to work is where one of the actors in the water fund is in fact a crazy worthy counterparts them so often the utility in the perfect world the utilities will just do this right I mean that you know and then you wouldn't need special-purpose vehicles off the balance sheet of the utility trouble is most utilities in the world are a department of a municipality they're not actually a corporate identity and so there's questioning the Catholic and the operating accounts don't work together and in that world it's harder to make the case because you have to spend money to buy a piece of land and you know taking a picture in front of a beautiful landscape is not the same thing as taking a picture in front of them if you're a politician and so there's there's reasons why you then have to go to a second best option which is can we regulate by contracts can we set up a vehicle that is able to receive funds and then expend them and in our experience so far even just that even having a current account requires a credit worthy counterpart and certainly when we go to financing it it will so in layman's language privatized utility is better able to adopt this model or not necessarily a corporatized utility whether it's private public it's a matter but what I'm saying is it needs to use the discipline of a of the financial or Mohnish management I think we're nearly there unless there any other questions anything else people want to ask well Julia thank you very much thank you excellent before we thank you I'd like to just advertise one more planetary health talk this term here on food systems so so we're moving from water to food this time next week so do come back if you can if you can't we'll continue to have the occasional event on planetary health running through through the determine into a new year but thank you very much indeed Julia that's been marvelous and lots to take home to think about thank you [Applause]