BIOPATH Dialogue with David Hill on Nature and Finance - watch video
Mistra BIOPATH organises regular Dialogues with experts within and outside the consortia but mainly intended for an internal audience to build competence and to share insights in various instruments, frameworks or similar with relevance for integrating biodiversity in financial decision-making. In October 2025, we had the pleasure to talk to professor David Hill, Founder and President of the Foundation for Nature.
BIOPATH Dialogue seminar with Professor David Hill, moderated by Viktor Elliot. Click on image to play.
At the Swedish Biodiversity Symposium, on 21-23 October in Gothenburg, we also had the opportunity to have David Hill as a panelist in the session organised by Victor Elliot and Susanne Arvidsson on the theme: “Biodiversity finance pathways: Perspectives from Sweden,” exploring innovative financial mechanisms and investment models that can mobilize capital for nature-positive outcomes. It brought together experts from academia, finance, and policy to discuss how Sweden can lead the way in integrating biodiversity into financial decision-making.
Behind the scenes at the Symposium we filmed an interview with David Hill for our upcoming online course on Biodiversity and Business but it will take some time to finalise. In the meantime, we decided to share the video from the Dialogue session, approximately 40 minutes, where all other participants in the online meeting have been blurred.
The topics in the video ranges from why it is critical to make nature economically visible, what are we really referring to when we talk about the nature-finance gap? How does the concept of Biodiversity Net Gain work in the UK? What has been the effects so far? How does the model of the Environment Bank in the UK that has pioneered habitat and biodiversity banking, translated ecological restoration into an investable asset?”
If you want to learn more from David Hill, Viktor Elliot recommends his podcast: How to avoid moving to Mars.
Short bio David Hill
David Hill founded the Environment Bank in the UK in 2006 and developed the concept of Biodiversity Net Gain, successfully implemented into law in the Environment Act 2021, creating the first global compliance-based biodiversity market. A passionate nature conservationist, David was a founding member and previously Deputy Chair of Natural England, the government’s statutory advisers on nature conservation, Board Member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, a member of the government’s Ecosystem Markets Taskforce, Chairman of Plantlife International and a Commissioner with the Food Farming and Countryside Commission.
He is currently a Board member of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Woodland Trust and a member of the science committee of FERA. His work on promoting the importance of nature finance and the role of environmental markets, backed by his extensive experience in the land-based sectors, is changing the shape and pace of nature restoration.