GROUNDED Live - 2026: Rayne van den Berg - Natural Capital: Valuing Life in Balance

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, natural capital specialist Rayne van den Berg explores how recognising the value of healthy ecosystems could reshape the future of farming. From biodiversity and soil health to carbon and water, Rayne explains how valuing the environmental benefits farmers provide may create new opportunities for both landscapes and livelihoods. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. I've always been a bit funny about this idea that we've got to pay uh for natural uh systems, that we should be paying someone to store carbonated soil or to look after biodiversity. But it makes sense, I guess, in the capitalist market. And I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time with Rain Vanderburgh on a uh at the actually Wilmot Field Days uh on a bus. And she was explaining exactly what natural capital is and why it matters and why it can be such an agent for change if you take the money and you value things in our society that farmers do, that people do, that are important, and say, well, hang on, someone needs to be paying for this. We need to classify that as important and value it when we value land, when we value um systems. So this is natural capital valuing life in balance.

SPEAKER_04 1:11

Welcome to day two of Grounded. Is there anyone who's just here for day two who wasn't here yesterday? Welcome, special welcome. That's so exciting. Uh are they in for a good time, day one people? Um, yeah, I'm really excited to be here. My name is Danny Valant, and I'm going to be your tent host in the Yarragum tent today. Um we had an amazing welcome to country yesterday by a traditional owner that I would I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, um, the Eastern Ma Nation. Very privileged to be here. Um acknowledge uh the traditional owners and any First Nations people that are with us today. Um it's yeah, a little privilege to stand on country. So I feel like this is the cool, cozy tent. Um, all the sessions are going to be amazing today. So I I know you're gonna move around, but I look forward to seeing you whenever you drop back into Yarragum. Um our first speaker is Rain Vandenberg. One of the most exciting things I did yesterday, along with a whole bunch of amazing, mind-blowing, sustaining things, was to go on a walk, to look at a tree, to see how carbon is calculated and to um just yeah, really helped me appreciate trees in a whole different way, to think about all the energy um that they embody and the way that that can be used to make other decisions about land management and farming. Um, Rain Vandenberg knows all about that. Um, there were all these calculations. I hadn't heard Pi R squared for a long time, and I was like, I finally know what MAS was for. But I said to Rain, I feel like you already know all this. She was like, uh, yeah, I do. Um so Rain has founded the Capitals Coalition's Australia Hub, Value Australia. Um, the Global Forestry National Capital project convenes 18 of the world's largest sustainable forestry owners with custodianship of more than 28 million hectares across 38 countries to measure, value, and prepare harmonised natural capital accounts. Um yeah, I find this stuff really mind-blowing, and I'm looking forward to handing over to Rain to learn a lot more about it. We'll have time for questions at the end.

SPEAKER_05 3:41

Thank you. Thanks, Danny. What a great intro. Um, yeah, so I'm a number cruncher, so I apologize in advance. I can't spell, but I can add some things up. And um, I thought I might just be really relaxed. If people have got burning questions, happy to make this very informal fireside kind of chat. It feels even I'm quite short usually, so it seems really odd to be up high, actually. I'm getting so um my name's Rain Vandenberg, and I'm uh I've been a CFO for a number of big organizations over my life um in AG, actually, but also in aquaculture. I was in the wine industry for a couple of years, um, trying to drink what I was worth. And even a stint, I was the inaugural CFO for the Great Barrow Reef Foundation many years. I'm showing my age now. But most recently in forestry, and I was the CFO for a company called Forico, um, which has is the largest plantation forestry estate in Tasmania, that 180,000 hectares. It's the old guns estate. So you get a bit of a sense of that story that I'm going to share with you about that transformation of those assets over time to being now leading natural capital assets. Um, so uh I suppose my journey started with natural capital accounting when I started that role at Borico about seven, eight years ago now. And I we had a moment where we walked into the forest and it I was with an ecologist. So it's uh it sounds like the beginning of a joke. You know, an ecologist and an accountant walk into a forest and they try to have a conversation. And we sat there for a good couple of hours trying to talk to each other. And I was talking about return on investment and discounted cash flows and inventory and biomass modeling and all kinds of really random stuff. And equally they were talking about biodiversity and a whole lot of Latin names for things and ecosystem services, and we just couldn't find how we would actually, but there was passion and there was uh what we could align on was that there was value there. And it became really clear to me that what we were traditionally recording and valuing in our traditional accounting system didn't actually reflect where the value really was for a forestry or someone relying and depending on on nature for its income. So we got started, and natural capital for me is essentially I'm a translator. So I try and take all this amazing work and stories about good land stewardship or even bad landship and try and turn it into a story that really resonates with the financial capital investment community. So it is about taking all that amazing measurement, putting values on it, and presenting it like a balance sheet in PL and notes. Now, I know hardened environmentalists would be horrified by the idea of valuing nature like that and putting a price on it, but this is quite different to monetizing it. This is actually valuing it in a way that makes sure that it's part of the decision making that's happening because it's at the moment it's invisible unless you record it and put it in front of investors. Now, to give you a sense, when we did the Horoco first set of accounts for that 180,000 hectares of land across 5,000 titles, like it's it's a monster of an estate to try and manage and collect information for. We presented it with a balance sheet and we measured the six most material ecosystem services at the time, including carbon sequestration. Um, but we also looked at water and hydrology, we looked at habitat as a proxy for biodiversity, we looked at biomass provisioning, so we weren't shying away from the fact that the land was providing us timber and biomass. Um, and we also looked at um essentially water quality, like erosion control and how the estate was being managed to prevent essentially sediment from leaving the estate. So we measured all of those, acknowledged there was lots of other ecosystem services that were being provided, honey and recreation and anglers, and you know, even like things like pepper berries were being harvested by the local indigenous communities. So there was all these really great stories. And so it feels really overwhelming going, we can't do this until we've measured all the honey or we've measured how many times people are fished, and you know, what's the value of someone sitting in nature? All of those things are totally valuable. So we said, let's just start with the first six that actually are material for decision making that might change the way that we make decisions in our accounts. So as soon as we gave ourselves uh essentially that scope, and said, let's just start there, acknowledge there's all this other stuff, but let's just start with the first six, it became a lot easier because a lot of that information was already held by all these amazing people that worked in our in our company. So we had GIS specialists and we had accountants and foresters and ecologists and lots of different people. So we pulled all that together and we just happened to put it in a format that was quite different. And what I didn't realize at the time is that no one else in the world had actually done that yet. They talked about it. It was one of the first published case studies to present nature in its own balance sheet. Now, the punchline to it is that those natural capital values, when we added up all those assets, were conservatively six times more valuable than our traditional balance sheet, which said there was six times more value in all these other services that we weren't actually selling. So that got the attention of our investors very, very quickly. Essentially, that there was all this value sitting there beyond chipping and shipping and regrowing. So I think those accounts became really famous for four reasons on reflection. First time it had been given a balance sheet format to essentially tell that story in a way that really resonated with the financial community. And the accountants is the language of that investment community, rightly or wrongly, it's there, the profession. Um, it was audited, we essentially had assurance by a big four, which is still quite unique even to this day, to have KPMG come on that journey with us and provide assurance and credibility. So being an accountant and making up stuff and being creative is not usually seen as a good thing. So that's why financial accounting has those layers of certification already baked in with the audits, essentially. So they provided a public opinion that we could actually, our auditors, essentially our our directors and our investors allowed that report to be published publicly because there was confidence that someone else had checked, checked by numbers, checked what we'd done. Not said it was right, but said essentially they were signing off that we did what we said we had done. The third reason was probably the most exciting for me, because it started changing the conversation strategically around where the value was and where the future value could be. And we started thinking of ourselves not as a forestry company with a very checkered past, you know, of exactly what you don't do. You know, there's textbooks written around the guns empire and the rise and fall of guns, corruption, bribery, you know, loss of total social license, and how those assets essentially totally got degraded in value because they'd lost the community's support. Um, so much so that those assets went to receivership. And that's when Borico was essentially born out of that. When the investors came in, international investors came in and bought Borico. They essentially took those assets and made a commitment to the community that they would do this differently, that they weren't going to harvest any natural native forest anymore. Um, so of those 180,000 hectares of land, about 90,000 was plantations, eucalyptus predominantly, for short rotation pulp and paper. The other 88,000 or so was essentially held as conservation and biodiversity. So we had these large tracts of land, riparian corridors, high biodiversity areas, that we were spending over like one and a half million dollars a year maintaining, replanting, pest control, weed control, monitoring. And so my board said to me, Where's the value? We should just sell all of that to dairy farmers and they could clear it, because it's worth more as a dairy farm than it is as um conservation land. And there was ridiculous values in there, which is why I was in the forest with an ecologist, right? At the beginning of the story. Um, so they challenged and said, Where's the value? And that's what started our natural capital accounts. So we started thinking about those areas differently. And then the fourth reason, which gets our investor um, I suppose audiences very excited around this globally, is that those natural capital accounts, because we prepared them for a number of years, it wasn't just a once-off, have a bit of a pilot, something that's prepared every year in the same reporting rhythm as our financial report, we do our natural capital report on those assets. Um, you get a really strong sense of the trend. And there's a very strong story there of maintaining and protecting those values. But essentially they're saying we're sequestering more carbon than we're emitting, you know, we're growing more than we're harvesting, we're looking after these areas and improving their condition over time. And that's that's for accountant, that's the definition of sustainability. That's how I would show that we're keeping value. And that's that's the secret source when you're talking to investors, is talk about value. You know, don't talk about reduced return because you're doing social good. That might be the truth, but when you talk to investors, talk about value and protecting value and resilience. So those assets went to sale as part of a natural process. When they were first bought, what would happen is the big institutional capital would come in and put them into a 10-year fund because most of them were pension funds, like the Detroit Auto Workers, etc. So they have a liability to pay out pensions. So they buy these big natural capital assets with the intention to cash out that value in 10 years' time. So it was all about getting these assets ready for that. And the investors that bought in 10 years ago either had to buy back in or they sold out and we had new investors coming in. So a big part of that was the biggest due diligence that had ever happened in Australasian history. I'm still a bit traumatized from it being a CFO. But the interesting bit was the natural capital accounts got a lot of attention in that process. And I can say, I can tell you how much, but I can tell you very materially there was a price premium paid on the enterprise value of that estate for all this additional value that was being derived for society and for future carbon markets, nature repair markets. And that's the story that's been getting a ridiculous amount of attention internationally, and which probably started my really cool story of becoming going from an accountant sitting in the middle of Blonceston to traveling the world because accountants never go anywhere. And all of a sudden I found myself in Montreal watching global biodiversity framework get signed off, which kind of just blew my mind that we were, I was part of a business envoy essentially actively lobbying for higher rigor and transparency around nature impact. So there's a target 15 as part of that framework, the essentially the Paris Agreement for Nature, that 192 countries signed up to, including Australia. And uh Target 15 is about disclosure. It's getting businesses to understand their impacts, dependencies, hence their risks and opportunities. So, you know, we were part, I remember being part of those delegations with some amazing big ASX companies, BHP, Rio Teamto, Combank, there was in the NAD, all kinds of people there actively campaigning. And the, you know, the delegators of politicians that were arguing what the text should look like between brackets, which is what happens at these big conferences, but coming back going, businesses never accept that. And we'd be like, Yes, they do, you know. So they actually had a lot more ambition to sign off that target that we would, which has now become the TNFD, which is the Task Force of Nature-related financial disclosures, that got released a year later. So all of a sudden I found myself at New York on the um stock exchange floor at the New York um where the TNFD, which was the the first disclosure framework, was built around what this would look like to have a common language about talking about nature in financial markets. And if any of you have met Tony Goldner, another amazing Australian who's leading that work, um, he talks about the bees meeting the bulls and the bears, which I thought was really cool. So the whole stock exchange in New York was lit up with forests and bees and nature. It was quite phenomenal when they released this. And um, so the financial markets are really interested in this information because they know that's where value transfer is going to happen over the next 10, 15 years. So they're all scurrying, trying to work out where the risk is. There's systemic risk and change happening, not just about climate, but arguably around much broader nature and natural capital. So when some of the companies who initially, global companies, looked at where their climate risk was, so you know, they started doing net zero strategies. Some of those then did piloting for the TNFD, for the nature disclosures, looking at water, looking at pollin, you know, essentially biodiversity loss, they were looking at um water scarcity and pollinators and other dependencies on nature. They actually found there was more inherent risk and blindsiding in their value chain in the broader nature perspective than in climate change that have been getting all the attention. And I think about climate being one leg of a four-legged nature chair. It's about emissions, essentially, largely. It's all interconnected, I get that, but we've been focusing on carbon in the air without thinking about all these other interconnected systems, water and pollution and et cetera. So TNFD, I see I actually see TNFD should one chapter should be climate, and then one should be water, and one should be marine, and one should be land, etc. Um, so so all of a sudden we got TNFD. Um, that is now getting embedded into accounting standards, which is really dull for a lot of people who aren't accountants, and I apologize, but this is how people make decisions on capital allocation. So if we're going to really turn this from being like a nice to have and a kind of niche end industry and all the passionate people in this room that have been doing this, how we put this and embed it into decision making, we need to change the system, tweak the system. And this is not about revolution. A lot of the work that we do at Capitals Coalition, which I'll talk about who that is in a second, is actually tweaking the economic system. To think about capital more than just financial capital, to include natural capital, what does nature give us and what do we take from nature? Social capital, which is our relationships with our communities and trust and human capital, which is about labor and intellect and all kinds of things. So if we only focus on financial, which is what the capitalist market has been doing for such a long time, we're going to have these really distorted effects, which is what we're seeing, these externalities, where we're actually only looking at one thing. So the Capitals Coalition is a global organization of about 500 partners and a really engaged community, which is all about tweaking that system, that economic system. And for me, that's the interesting bit. So all those people that are in that network are cross-sectorial. Central bankers, their accounting standards, their companies, their um governments, their treasuries, they're all kinds of people working really hard to talk to each other and see how we can tweak the system. Have I lost anyone yet? No? It's all kind of cool. Um, so hopefully the caffeine will start kicking in with everyone now. So the exciting bit for me is that forico work gets a ridiculous amount of attention because it was the first kind of published case study. So much so that we're now doing that project on Royds internationally as part of this natural capital forestry project. Um, when the problem is I tell everyone what they should be doing, and they called my bluff and said, Well, do it. I said, all the forestry companies should be doing this to try and tell a different story about their industry and their transformation. And they said, Right, do it. What do you need? I said, Oh, well, you'd want this and this, and I'd need a bit of money, and I'd, you know. So the TNFDs funded it, the forestry companies have put in a bit, but most importantly, they're putting in their own in kind time, and they had to commit to create their own set of accounts by October this year. So it was a notional amount just to contribute, and they're all heavily on board. We thought we'd get six. We ended up getting 18, which freaked me out. And then said, Oh, we'll work that out when we get there. Um, and we've got another six as observers. So essentially the whole Timberland investment community are now going, they've all done interesting work, but have realized that they need to be moving as a herd to change the conversation because the market's saying, Oh, there's no standards and there's no way to do this. They're saying there is. There's lots of great innovation, thought leadership. Let's see if we can actually do that at scale. So very ambitiously, we said we'll have these sets of accounts done by COP31, which we thought was going to be here in Australia. It's not, who knows? Turkey's got other priorities at the moment. Who knows? But we have this ridiculous sense of these, all of these um companies and investors working together to measure value, not just for what it means to the business or the investor, but to society of all these benefits that they've got custodianship for, and then presenting it in a really consistent way, so that the narrative is really strong. Um, you could imagine other sectors kind of like, well, what fire white forestry, why are they doing it first? So we've got a very similar program happening with mining globally at the moment, a consortium on mining. People like mining, you know, whatever. But they actually have ridiculous stewardship of land. BHP alone has 9 million hectares as part of their portfolio, and they're extracting on 1%. So if we can start getting them to think about what that other 99% looks like, um, most of it's under pastoral leases at the moment, and they're not really particularly viable. It's kind of the scene of a tick boxing. They're now seriously thinking about how they restore some of those areas. You know, how do they rehydrate them, etc.? And many of them are next to really higher biodiverse areas of the world. So it's not perfect, but it's changing the conversation and getting people to think differently around stewardship and custodianship. Um, equally very keen to do something in agriculture, um, which is why I love coming to this and learning and listening from all of you guys. Um, so we're trying to get something very similar up where we'll take a coalition of the willing through doing natural couple accounts at scale here in Australia. And the Europeans have got one coming up as well that we're giving a pitch to to do that at scale somewhere in Europe.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

It might be Scandinavia or Holland. Hi, Ren Rebecca Gorman.

SPEAKER_06 24:55

Uh sorry to interrupt, I know you're on the flow, but I this you were getting to the question that I um had, and it but I wanted a clarification, if you could. We talk about the true cost of growing food, uh, but don't really have an accounting uh framework to do that. Is that what this coalition of your agricultural willing would come up with? And who would be included?

SPEAKER_05 25:23

Ah, I knew you were gonna Rebecca. So this is where I get myself in trouble because I promise big things and then have to deliver. But the ambition, so the idea around Value Australia is to bring all of these amazing thought leaders together to get these coalitions to pull this together, to tell a different story about value, both the cost, you know. I think the you know, the cost of living conversation, we're not having a really honest conversation around how much of that is climate and nature related and how much is everything else. So we can get a framework to be able to value that. So I know where you're going, Rebecca, and we will be coming out and trying to find people that are interested. I think I'm talking on the fly here, but ag is such a big thing, right? And there's lots of different commodities, lots of different ways of farming. We'd have to try and find a way. Like, I don't know how you can do wine and cattle grazing at the same time. We might have to do separate bits, right? We do horticulture and then do wine or do grazing or do cropping separately, but we're keen. So watch this faith, and I definitely have your number. So um, and others, you know, this is the community of the willing. You know, you guys have got lots of great data. Um, we're here to try and help translate that data into something that will mean something to bankers and to investors and other stakeholders, governments, advocacy, etc. So the Capitals Coalition, the work I'm doing now is this big forestry project, um, which is getting like I'm I'm actually scared because it's gonna work, which is really cool, right? So I'm presenting to the board of the TNFD in June, and they're actually changing some of the recommendations to look more at ecosystem services, which is essentially what nature's giving and taking from us, which is a bit of a modification, to start really thinking about productive land systems. I think a lot of the natural capital work and conversation has been very binary. Sometimes it's either conservation or car park. We have to have that really important conversation around how we change productive systems and you know, how do we do forestry better, how do we do ag better, how do we do built environment better? That's the bit that really interests me. Um, and how, like the porico model, it's this mosaic of landscapes and how we all work together to make better choices and tell that story really clearly. Um, we've got another session this afternoon, so I'm not gonna talk too much about the farming for the future now, but Carmel Onions and I are going to talk about that work that we did and how we then started talking to bankers about that and rural property valuers about changing the way land is going to be valued based on ecological conditions. So there's a little teether um over lunchtime, and I'd love to have Carmel talk about how that's she changing that system from within in the bank and starting these conversations. So the work we're doing now is really about tweaking that system. And I wanted to, I'm happy to take questions, but I also wanted to leave with two really optimistic stories that I've seen just in the last two months of where this system's being tweaked. Last week, my boss, Mark Goff, um, was in Washington for the International Monetary Fund meetings, the spring meetings, they're called the Spring Meetings. Um, that's where the World Bank gets together. It talks about big things. Now, they were told not to talk about climate change by the administration and the US, which that made them talk about climate change more, um, etc. But he was there and they are actively negotiating for developing countries to have their debt reduced if they can protect and restore natural capital. So it's getting embedded into some of that decision making around finance and being able to show essentially an ecosystem per say we will reduce your debt to fund development if you can protect these sensitive areas, that it's not just you lock it up and protect it because you've got it and we don't. It's actually how do we trend, you know, acknowledge the value of that. I think that's exciting. That could have real change at a world level. The other one that I wanted to mention, there's this very cool guy in Australia called Carl Obston. I don't know if many of you know him. Um he's an economist, so he's not an accountant, that that's not his fault. He says, You're not an economist. I said, but that's not my fault. Um, but he has been working with the UN to change the way that GDP is going to be calculated to consider natural capital extraction and creation. That I think is really cool because you know, GDP is flawed, it's it worked its purpose after the war, but it's not perfect. So they're tweaking that system to consider how they'll start considering ecological value protection rather than extraction into that calculation. So essentially, if you're just take making all your wealth by extracting and not restoring or regenerating, that's going to become essentially factored into national statistical accounts, which is very cool. So, two little things to just give you a bit of a sense. There's actually one more bonus one if you want, that I find so I do a lot of the accounting, the grassroots, working with land custodians and sea custodians to be empowered about their value story of where this value is, what they're providing, why it's totally undervalued in their value chains, just so they can renegotiate what that looks like in carbon markets and emerging nature markets. The other one that's happening from the other side is central bankers are now starting to think about nature as a systemic risk, and they're trying to value and measure what that means. Now, there's something called um, I suppose uh the Basel uh Basel one, two, and three. And I'm looking at Siobhan here, and she's gonna correct me. So bear with me, I'm not a banker, but my understanding of how it's been explained to me is that when the global financial crisis happened many years ago, all central banks got together and said we have systemic risk in our financial system. What guardrails can we put around that? Around how much equity is sitting in our banks, you know, what exposures have we got? So they're a lot more resilient to shocks and crises. They've had a couple of initiations. The most recent one is Basal III, where they said, well, nature is now fundamentally a risk. So they're gonna start looking at natural capital and making sure that every country and their central bank understands how much exposure they have to climate and nature risk and change how much buffering they've got in their financial system for that. So it's gonna need to be measured, which is why everyone is now getting quite excited about how do we actually do that to change the decision making. Anyway, there's three little quick snapshots of what's happening. Happy to have a conversation, take questions.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Thank you so much, Shrain.

SPEAKER_04 32:40

I I just love these conversations where you uh you're an example of people who are working out other way we can stand together, like stand next to each other and look at problems across different fields. Um I'd love you to just um, if I can sneak in with my own question. You know, what about baby accountants who perhaps don't have the opportunity to stand in a forest with an ecologist and think about the big picture? What would you how would you like to see that training change for people who are coming up and, you know, could be people, the next people to help solve these problems?

SPEAKER_05 33:12

I actually wish I was starting again because the youngsters, they get this. Like I get like we uh had a sustainability conference for the chartered accountants here in Australia at in December. We had a 120% attendance because people rocked up even without tickets, hoping that people wouldn't turn up. So there's so much excitement in the field of young people going, we want to learn this. This is it's more than just financial accounting. How do we start measuring nature, social? And even though people mumble and grumble and go, compliance, mandatory reporting, why are we doing it? They're actually missing the point. That now that the account accountants like to colour between the lines, well, most accountants, I'm a bit different, which gets me into trouble. But my the thing about the accounting profession is they see themselves as gatekeepers of, you know, they've got a real role in our society to create trust and confidence in financial markets. And they like rules. So we're actually trained. Is it a law? I'll engage when it's law. It's what we're trained, and that's what you want them to do, right? You don't want them going rogue. But having now mandatory disclosure, the accountants are like, tell us how to do this, and they're engaged, and it becomes very sticky because once it's there, they don't roll it back very easily either. So it's one of the few professions in the world that actually has an international standard around how it's prepared. So once it gets into those standards, it's slow to get there, admittedly. We think it's been really fast, but it's slow for everybody else. But once it's there, it becomes really sticky and it becomes really embedded. So that's what excites me is young accountants get it. We're actually working with the chartered accountants at the moment, and they're embedding capital sinking into their new professional development program, just like ethics. So there's actually gonna be mandatory sustainability right across their program, which is I wish I was young again, starting all over. Like it's very cool.

SPEAKER_04 35:13

Yeah, it's really exciting. Now I'm sure there's lots of questions. Please um put your hand up and Meg's gonna come around with a microphone.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Hi, my name's Josh. I'm from New South Wales. I'm a farmer, but I came from that world you're talking about. I was a lawyer for 20 years. Uh TNFD, fantastic. Could you just comment on how it's being woven into Australian law and systems? Because my observation is nothing happens until it has to happen. And accountants are not risk takers. Yeah, so so the lot of goodwill, and we're preaching to the converted here, but it's really hard to get people to actually do it. And we need legislation and ASIC guidelines and corporations law integration and all those really boring things, then it'll happen.

unknown 36:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:03

So the way it kind of works for standard development, if we follow what's happened with climate, so the IPCC did all the scientific, I think about the scientists doing all their analysis, that then becomes a task force where they say, okay, we need to start measuring this for private sector. So they had something called the Task Force for Climate Related Financial Disclosures years ago, TCFD started it all. That's all been wound up because as soon as they do their work, get everyone together, work out what it looks like as a this is globally, and then it gets handed across to the standards bodies. So the international standards bodies took courage of that and created the new accounting standards, S1, S2, or what we know as Ipros one and two. And then it's up to every jurisdiction of the world to work out who has to do that and on what time frame. So it's up to the Australian Treasury who has stewardship of that here in Australia to work out who has to do mandatory climate disclosure S2, which is what we've just started, the very first tranches here in Australia for the December year ends. And we've started just seeing those reports in the last couple of months. And then they'll, as they go through, more and more entities will be captured in that. Now there's a bit of pushback because it's changed and that's difficult and it does take effort, but it's worth doing. And um, like I said, once it becomes, it's there for a reason. Like no one likes compliance. Even accountants hate compliance, but it's there because it's managing a risk. And people have to remember that it's managing a risk, which also can become an opportunity. So if boards engage in it, um, I'm actually saying don't wait for it to be mandatory. This should actually be part of your strategic planning process. Because TNFD is just, I'll give you a hint, you don't have to read 600 pages, it's strategic planning, thinking about nature. So just where do you interact with nature? What do you take, what do you give from nature? You don't have to read everything, don't tell TNFD. I just said that to everyone, but it is strategic planning, which is core board and business job, right? Their role is to look at where the opportunities, risks, trends, threats are, risks and opportunities. So there is a lot of voluntary adoption. And unput lots of people actually said they'll do voluntary adoption. And interestingly, a bit of plug, um, Foreco did the very first disclosure in the world for Climate and Nature Together, because I'm inherently lazy, and I remember saying to them, I'm not doing nature without doing climate at the same time. They're the same thing when you're talking about land and you're talking about nature-based solution. And TNFD said, Oh, that's really interesting. No one's thought about that. You and have that go. And I said, I'm a bit busy, we're selling the assets, got a day job. And they said, Come on, and they found my kryptonite. I'm getting a bit off story, but they found my kryptonite and he said, I've got a bit of money for you to do it. This is a TNFD. It was like 10,000, neck next to nothing. But because he'd given me money, I had to do it. And I remember him calling me going, Have you done it? I said, Yeah, we've pulled it together. But I have to get it through my board so we can publish it. And he said, Oh, right, can you have that ready for New York Climate Week? I said, Yeah, I'm a bit busy, like trying to sell like a billion plus asset. But whatever. I sneak it through the board paper. Well, I didn't sneak it through the board paper, just to be clear. Um But um so and then before I knew it, I was on New York Climate Week, and our Forico report was in lights as the first disclosure of climate and nature, and now lots of people are doing it, and it's been downloaded 50,000 times because lots of small businesses love to just see what it looks like rather than read all the technical guidance. But it is strategic planning. So I'd actually say people are waiting for it to be mandatory, they've actually missed the point of what it is. So S2 is mandatory, so S2 is the climate one, and hot off the press, the IW I'm such a nerd. Um the IWSB, which is the international standards, met yesterday in London on Earth Day, 22nd of April. It was yesterday. Um, and they have agreed not to do an S3. So everyone's like, is it gonna be S3? Nature. They've decided not to do S3. They're gonna weave it into S1, which is essentially a much broader sustainability topic and give themes. Because the idea is not just nature and it's not just climate, it's gonna be about social capital, human capital. And that capital's thinking is actually gonna be woven into IWSB, which is super cool. And you've heard it here first, but that's hot off the press if they're not going to just keep doing new standards. What they're gonna do is each jurisdiction will say, right, we'll add, we're now gonna focus on nature, etc. So Treasury in Australia has said nature will follow climate. But um I actually say what people should be doing is actually doing it, preparing it, understanding it internally, ready for disclosure. So there's quite a bit of a long way to make that happen. So I've gone up on 10, but that hopefully it's coming. So if you're talking to ministers, etc. We say it needs to be there. But um I think we also don't want to push people too hard because then you'll get people pushing that. So we want those voluntary people essentially using the framework, it's there, using it, creating it, using it internally for decision making and getting all their responses, their mitigation responses happening, what they're gonna do, what they're gonna invest in, how they're gonna change behavior. Hopefully investing in regen ag, right? That would be cool. And looking at some of these under, you know, uh industries and investments that need deeper levels of support so that they've got something to talk about when they get to mandatory disclosure.

SPEAKER_07 41:53

Thanks, Rain. So exciting. Um Carolyn Hall, CEO of the Malone Institute. Um I've been uh interested in this space for a long time and it's been driven by necessity trying to get the funding to do the landscape rehydration and restoration of landscape function work across agricultural land that we do. Um at the moment we're in uh grant funding and philanthropic funding stages. So when we talk about nature in boardrooms becoming um considered a risk but also an opportunity, um, we know that a number of ASX listed companies in Australia are already on the train to thinking about that. Um I'm really interested in investment, uh, and that's what I need for the Mullen Institute and for the ag sector in Australia to be able to scale our work. So, um and when I say scale, I mean scale across the whole country. So I'm wondering about your thoughts about how far we are from serious investment in the restoration of natural capital in this country and and globally.

SPEAKER_05 43:12

Big question. Okay. Let's see. So I have an opinion about everything. I actually think you have to get information to people to make those decisions, right? So philanthropic and government and grant funding has taken us so far already. But when you talk to corporates, you do have to change how you talk to them, right? And I think a lot of well-meaning conservationists, etc., take the same pitch deck to a corporate. And what I mean by that, uh, like an example, I've been doing some work with the New South Wales Biodiversity Conservation Trust on this. They're doing great work. Like, I wish I lived in New South Wales, don't tell Teddy that, but like they're doing some really good stuff, but they can't engage with the ASX because they go and they say, Do you want to invest? In nature restoration. And they're like, that's not our job. That's not part of what corporates do. You know, they might have a little bit of a sustainability budget, but that's not how they're wired to think. So, but if you go to them with the same essentially work, and you say, Do you want to invest in supply chain resilience and security of supply for your lamb to make sure you've still got lamb at the right margins that gets into the supermarket? They're like, How do we sign up? Where do we invest to make sure that we keep lamb in our in our baskets, right? Because they're high value products. So just tweaking that language gets a totally different response from people beyond just sustainable. They become the CFO. And people say, How do you get finance teams to talk about this? Well, you talk about value protection. They think their margins being eroded or their profits being eroded, hence their market capitalization. That's their job to protect that. So part of the narrative is talking about nature as an asset, just like you would fences or dams or you know, sheds, etc. And that if they invest in nature, nature will actually maintain future cash flows for them. Sounds very clinical, but this is it's so it's it's so even the TNFD doesn't talk about restoration anymore and nature. They talk about resilience, building resilience into our financial system. Because essentially TNFD and all of this accounting is talking to an investor mindset. It's not talking to environmentalists, but environmentalists have to kind of change the way they talk to accountants. Accountants have to learn a bit more about ecology, and we have to meet somewhere in the middle and find a common language. And then when people say, Well, why that's exactly what natural capital is for me, is trying to find a way to both have the a conversation around value of shared value, what this actually means to us and what really matters. Hopefully that answers your question quickly in five minutes. But I think if you can tweak that, but equally for governments, like if you instead of saying this is going to cost a billion dollars, this project, if we can actually articulate what that means to society in other savings, you change the the way that business case gets framed. So there's really cool value factors now. Like if you want saving, like tap out, or there's a safe word or something, but I could talk about this forever. But there's some really cool that there's something called the social cost of carbon now. So the scientists have worked out what's happening in our environment. They've been telling us for a long time. The bit that's exciting is the economists have all got together and they've worked out what that means to finance, to society, and they've put a value on emissions, carbon emissions. How carbon, I haven't seen what the lathe's carbon price for an accu is. What's that? 37 bargain, right? The social cost of carbon is 236 US dollars a ton. So that is someone has sat down and gone, but every ton of carbon we're emitting, it is costing in externalities in the world 236 US dollars a ton. Now that's in lost productivity, hot day, loss of ecosystem, farm profitability and productivity, it's health, it's you know, building decay, all kinds of things that they've actually articulated and then said that is the cost for every carbon. So imagine if instead of going to the government, you say, Oh, I need $10 billion. What if we got to a point? This is where I go off, sorry, Dan, where we say, what if every bit that we're putting into soil we can actually show how much that is saving us in health benefits in the health system is preventative care and mental health costs and nutrition. If we could actually clearly articulate that, you'd have a totally different story about capital allocation and budget allocation. That's the cool bit. I think.

SPEAKER_04 48:06

Let's do it. Tangents are very welcome at grounded. Uh, we'll go up the back and we'll probably have to make this the last question, unless it's a um very short answer.

SPEAKER_03 48:18

It'll be a short answer. Thanks, Rain. I just have a question back to your comment on time. As someone that sits at the intersection of the farming industry and the policy in the corporate world, farmers have, you could argue, an ecological time frame in front of them, whether you're looking at the asset transfer that's about to take place, whether you're looking at the ecological degradation rate. And at the same time, we've got corporations and policies that need time, as you say, to get their infrastructure or their scaffolding of what that ask is going to look like or that accountability framework. Now, unfortunately in Australia, when people in the corporation, the policy space try and have a crack and they don't get it perfectly right, we like to slap them on the wrists. So when you talk about time needed from an accountant's perspective, how do you balance the ecological timeframe for those frameworks that are required, meaning quickly now, versus the rate of which our corporations and our policy development's taking place? And who's translating that in between so that we can move forward one step at a time?

SPEAKER_05 49:12

So an easy question from the thing. Yeah, you're awesome. So this is where the value story is actually really powerful because value looks at future cash flows. And they can people work on really long infrastructure projects. So time, when you're talking about investment, they actually know how to do that. And they discount that back to say, well, it's more important dollars today than it is in the future. When you start talking about natural capital, you actually have a much smaller discount rate. That you're actually there, there's some people saying actually preserving that value in time is actually more important. So all of a sudden you start changing in the models and the decision making, because it's this idea around intergenerational wealth transfer. So you give yourself time because you're not looking at today's income and cash flow, you're actually looking about what the future potential is. So you're talking about assets and creating assets and value. And people do that all the time in businesses and in you know, infrastructure projects. They have really long time frames. Like some of the toll roads or hospitals. We do that really well in Australia. Actually, some of all that work that we do around toll roads and hospitals and airports and infrastructure around investment was actually done here by Macquarie in Australia. And it exported that thinking of how to scale these long-term infrastructure projects, was actually made here in Australia. That innovation of how to do that to get this blended finance. So if we start thinking about nature needing long time frames and infrastructure for our health health system and our food systems, I think we can the time becomes less uh less important. Policy is totally different. The politicians are on a different uh time frame, arguably.

SPEAKER_08 51:00

We'll count that as a short answer, and we've got one more question. I'm bringing it right back to basics because I'm a originally farmer from Albury. Um Jill, my name. Um, I'm just wondering about the different languages. Just talked to lots of different languages today, and I'm down at the accepting that nature is very important for the success of my business. In fact, I can't operate it without it. So, what how am I going to see that in the future? Or do you have any idea? How's it going? Is it going to appear on a balance sheet? Um, it it what is it that's got to get down to maths at the end of the day?

SPEAKER_05 51:35

So there's lots of ways it can end up on a balance sheet. And there is an international campaign called Nature on the Balance Sheet, which is another cool thing I can talk about for ages. And it is about tweaking that system and finding what those assets are. Um I would actually say for people on farms come to the session later on where we talk about land valuation being attached to natural capital and how some of that changing and thinking is evolving. But equally, I can put whatever number I want on a balance. Well, no, I can't, I can put a value on something, but it doesn't get into a financial capital balance sheet until it's got a transaction or a trigger for recognition. Like it you can't just make up assets, right? There's and there's good reason for that. You need a policy or a transaction that makes an obligation for someone to do something, or a really clear financial benefit that you're going to get guaranteed income in the future. And this is where nature markets come in, because they're income streams and transactions and policies that create assets and liabilities for financial institutions. So until then, unless you've got a contract or a transaction or an agreement that gives you a really watertight legal obligation or a right to future income, you can't put on a financial balance sheet. But if we get a nature market, like carbon credits have created assets for us because they have got that rigor and regulation and policy around them. So a couple of things will have to happen at the same time with nature markets, with policy, with mandatory, with that structure, that financial structure to get it into financial capital. What I see is the natural capital balance sheets are kind of that step to that, to actually show where the value is to create those markets. It's a bit chicken and egg, but it's almost essentially giving, empowering landholders to understand their value so they can negotiate up the value chain. So we're actually providing not just this food, we're actually doing all of these other things for society to try and make sure that public good, the people who are benefiting from all those other services of carbon sequestration and water filtration and habitat and all these other things, all those city people, what they're benefiting from clean water, you know, through catchments, they're making a contribution to the stewardship of that. And that's where I think natural capital can talk about where the value is, where the benefit is, who's getting the benefit, and who's create providing that benefit. And it it's a little bit transactional, but it it helps reframe the conversation for that public good.

SPEAKER_04 54:15

Will you join me in thanking Rain Vandenberg?