Investing In Nature’s Intangible Benefits: Ecosystem Approaches For Resilience And Impact
Nature’s value extends far beyond raw materials or carbon markets. Yet, its intangible benefits remain largely unappreciated by markets.
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Leaders working to build a regenerative economy confront a central challenge: reconciling the many diverse benefits of nature with the existing metrics of today’s economy. Across the economy, impact investors, artists, economists, philanthropists, and spiritual leaders are collaborating in new and innovative ways to explore and assign value to the benefits of nature, including those intangible benefits that directly impact our human experience.
In this interview series, the Sorenson Impact Institute highlights the perspectives of experts who participated in our 2025 Climate Week panel, Valuing the Priceless: Investing in Nature’s Intangible Benefits. For the first article in the series, we spoke with two impact investing leaders on this critical topic:
- Jeremy Manion is the Managing Director of Carbon Markets at Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit that invests in exceptional start-ups and founders whose solutions have the potential to accelerate the pace, replicability, scale, and quality of its mission to inspire people to plant, nurture, and celebrate trees.
- Sushant Shrestha is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Open Future Fund, an organization that supports resource stewards in identifying, investing in, and growing the innate capacity of communities to advance their own resilience by working alongside local leaders, funders, and industry experts.
Jeremy Manion, Managing Director of Carbon Markets, Arbor Day Foundation
Why is your impact investing model based on an ecosystem approach?
Most human systems and natural ecosystems are at odds with each other due to poor design and narrow economic interests. Human systems based in Western capitalism are too focused on maximizing one high-value commodity at the expense of the sustainability and interconnections of the entire ecosystem, including its people and communities.
The Foundation and our partners leverage verified carbon markets to create additional income opportunities for landholders and improve ecosystem functions (i.e., clean air, clean water, restore habitat), while still producing commodities the world values (i.e., food, wood, livestock, etc.). Our approach is about catalyzing and changing land-use systems that can produce all the things humans and ecosystems need to symbiotically function for the long term. Then, collaborate with commercial investors and the corporate sector to close the current $200 billion annual gap in funding for nature-based solutions.
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Have you found diverse voices/values/communities to be effective ways to build resilience and support locally driven projects?
Yes, a key part of any successful project is starting with local communities and landholders. What do they want for their lives and communities? How do we help bring this vision to life? Forests will only be valued and restored if farming families, landholders, and communities can improve their lives by planting and growing trees.
How do you see collaboration, innovation, and knowledge exchange as critical to project success? How does it influence the ability to get projects funded and scaled?
Forest restoration requires the combination of multiple skills to achieve successful outcomes, including forestry, finance (debt and equity), technology, skilled labor, communications, and professional services such as insurance and guarantees. If any pieces are missing, this will prevent the project and market from scaling. All the pieces exist in the world today. People working in nature-based solutions and climate action are just beginning to figure out how to leverage structures to successfully combine all the ingredients.
As an investor, what metrics do you need to incorporate intangible values such as art and religion into your models and investment interactions?
We do not have a formal evaluation framework for intangible values yet. However, intangible values of people, projects, companies, and investors come up a lot when we are considering the differentiating context behind more traditional financial and impact metrics such as IRR or carbon sequestration. For example, we work on projects that have multiple-decade time horizons. We support projects with people we enjoy spending time with and who share compatible core values. We use our core values — and the behaviors that reinforce our values — to help guide us in the intangible values realm.
What do you suggest are the most useful actions we might take to move these conversations forward and into actions that can lead to the recognition and incorporation of previously “non-monetized” values of nature?
Bottom line: We need more case studies on how other organizations and cultures use intangible values when they make decisions.
Sushant Shrestha, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Open Future Fund
Why is your impact investing model based on an ecosystem approach?
Finance cannot be separated from culture, ecology, and community. Just as in nature, resilience emerges through diversity and interdependence. In finance, resilience is built when multiple voices, value systems, and knowledge traditions are present.
Have you found diverse voices/values/communities to be effective ways to build resilience and support locally driven projects?
Communities already understand this and hold contextual wisdom. We see it clearly in the international development field, where diverse voices are recognized and attempts are made to incorporate them. In impact investing, however, recognition of community wisdom is still in its early stages. Finance often overlooks how the local ecology actually works because it relies on external metrics and global frameworks rather than lived knowledge. This makes it necessary for practitioners of impact investing to learn alongside communities, rather than merely learning about them. In doing so, the practitioner undergoes a process of transformation, shifting from a detached analyst to a co-learner and partner.
Impact investing also carries the expectation of returns. On one side, this can limit the practitioner’s ability to fully see ground realities because pressures for financial performance can compress or oversimplify local complexity. On the other side, it holds enormous promise by creating the potential for economic sovereignty of local communities. When designed with plural valuation in mind, where science (the True), justice (the Good), and cultural or spiritual belonging (the Beautiful) all shape the flow of capital, impact investing can become a vehicle for communities to secure not only resources but also legitimacy, dignity, and long-term resilience.
How do you see collaboration, innovation, and knowledge exchange as critical to project success? How does it influence the ability to get projects funded and scaled?
Collaboration is not an “add-on” but the very infrastructure of resilient finance. Innovation often emerges at the intersections where Indigenous ecological wisdom meets actuarial modeling, or where artists and scientists co-design new valuation systems. Knowledge exchange ensures that finance does not become extractive but instead becomes reciprocal, pulling in both technical expertise and lived experience. From an investor’s perspective, projects that demonstrate genuine collaboration and multi-knowledge innovation are far more fundable and scalable. They signal reduced social risk, stronger legitimacy, and broader coalitions of support. In other words, collaboration is not only ethically sound, but it’s also a risk mitigation and value creation strategy.
As an investor, what metrics do you need to incorporate intangible values such as art and religion into your models and investment interactions?
Traditional finance leans heavily on quantification, but the reintegration I advocate requires a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative metrics:
- True (Data): Biodiversity counts, water quality indicators, mental health outcomes, cultural participation rates.
- Good (Justice): Distributional equity, governance inclusivity, Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) compliance.
- Beautiful (Meaning): Presence of sacred practices in project design, cultural identity preservation, aesthetic experiences (e.g., biophilic design impact on wellbeing).
In practice, this means adding narrative and experiential indicators alongside KPIs such as stories of cultural renewal, measures of community pride, or surveys of aesthetic/spiritual resonance. As an investor, I want to incorporate these into due diligence by combining financial analysis with anthropology, ecology, and cultural learnings in partnership with knowledge holders and community stakeholders. This makes the intangible visible in decision-making.
What do you suggest are the most useful actions we might take to move these conversations forward and into actions that can lead to the recognition and incorporation of previously “non-monetized” values of nature?
The next step is to shift from dialogue into institutionalized practice – translating thought leadership into investable case studies that validate performance, reduce risk, and can be scaled and replicated by other investors. A few key actions:
- Pilot Investments: Launch small-scale demonstration funds that explicitly embed cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions in their metrics (like the Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond or Yurok carbon offsets).
- Hybrid Evaluation Frameworks: Develop tools that allow financial, ecological, and cultural metrics to coexist without collapsing one into the other. These can serve as templates for investors.
- Cross-Sector Partnerships: Bring together scientists, Indigenous elders, artists, investors, and policymakers into design processes for finance instruments—ensuring wholeness from the start.
- Legitimacy as a Standard: Advocate for recognition of cultural legitimacy and rights-of-nature in regulatory and investment frameworks, making them non-optional in investment analysis.
- Education & Apprenticeship: Create pathways for investors and fund managers to apprentice with Indigenous and non-Western traditions, cultivating embodied practices so this shift is not only intellectual but lived.
In short: move from externality to asset. Treat belonging, meaning, and beauty not as costs to minimize but as core sources of value that enhance resilience, attract capital, and create long-term legitimacy.