Standards-based ecological restoration can unlock capital and ensure long-term resilience, says Bethanie Walder, Executive Director, the Society for Ecological Restoration.
Business leaders increasingly understand the wide-ranging financial, commercial, reputational and social risks that the degradation of nature, loss of biodiversity, and climate change create across their organisations, supply chains and communities. Research shows that half of the world’s GDP depends on nature. Nature provides an abundance of services, including fresh water, healthy soils, pollination, and clean air. It helps protect us from the worst impacts of extreme weather. Crucially, it also provides the raw materials at the base of nearly all supply chains and an extraordinary range of natural ingredients across industries, from health and beauty to industrial products.
Ratified in 2022, Target 2 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) mandates that countries must bring 30% of their degraded lands and waters under effective restoration by 2030. Ecological restoration, which focuses on the recovery of the native ecosystems that underpin global supply chains and ecosystem services, is central to meeting this ambitious target. But to meet it, the pace and scale of investment in ecological restoration and other restorative activities (Figure 1) must accelerate.
Ecological restoration increases business resilience
Ecological restoration is a powerful nature-based solution to help mitigate and adapt to the ecological crises we face. It is also an increasingly important economic driver. According to the European Commission, the monetary value of the benefits derived from restoration is on average eight to 38 times greater than the initial investment costs. Nevertheless, there remain hurdles to making the business case for investing in restoration.
In October, at the 11th World Conference on Ecological Restoration (SER2025), Maia Reed, Global Climate Lead at Mars Petcare, outlined how ecological restoration fits into Mars’ vision for the future. “Most companies have [sustainability strategies] in place for three reasons: risk, reputation, and resiliency. …many companies end up focusing on the first two and ignoring the last…which is where restoration plays a key role.”
However, restoration projects can be long and complex, making risks hard to manage and returns hard to measure. Three priority approaches can help investors address this challenge:
- Models: Illustrate that biodiversity is investable by showcasing diverse, standards-based project approaches, aligned with frameworks including the Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), so investors and corporates can gain confidence and plug into ready-to-scale opportunities.
- Methods: Lower risk and cost while improving outcomes via certified practitioners and projects, biome-specific best practices, and credible monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) – giving enterprises investor-grade evidence and auditability.
- Money: Unlock capital through insurance innovations, outcome-based and blended finance investment strategies, and policy/regulatory frameworks that prioritise certified, standards-based restoration, directing private investment toward high-integrity, reduced risk projects.
Underpinning these three essential approaches is the use of recognised standards to provide transparency and consistency in ecological restoration projects.
Standards help scale investment in restoration
Until now, the field of ecological restoration has been largely funded by government programmes, non-profit organisations, and philanthropy. This foundation has yielded mature, though still evolving science, robust practice standards, and a deep professional community capable of delivering high-quality outcomes. But to scale, ecological restoration must be investable with private capital.
Investors increasingly recognise the opportunity, yet require credible mechanisms to manage risk, track performance and verify outcomes. The International Principles and Standards for Ecological Restoration (SER Standards), first launched in 2016 by the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), provide a globally recognised foundation for restoration. Standards help us understand what is and isn’t ecological restoration – this was imperative in 2016 and is even more so today – since many well-intended initiatives, especially carbon initiatives, were being labelled as restoration, but were actually causing significant environmental harm. Standards help articulate not only what restoration is, but how to ensure that investments create positive outcomes for people and nature.
Tools within the SER Standards, like the Social Benefits and Ecological Recovery Wheels, are widely applied by practitioners around the world; the latter conveys progress of recovery of ecosystem attributes compared to those of a reference model. The SER Standards provide valuable support to initiatives like TNFD, which recognises that no one single metric can capture the ‘state of nature’. The Five-star System articulated in the SER Standards, and illustrated via the wheels, provides a useful tool to help measure change in the condition of an ecosystem, including threatened species, as a result of restoration, in alignment with TNFD’s emerging approaches to assess the state of nature.
Figure 2: The Ecological Recovery Wheel (ERW) (Gann et al. 2019)
Building trust in ecological and financial returns
Increasingly, regulators and major international bodies like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognise the use of standards as a key requirement for reducing risk and uncertainty in restoration. Likewise, corporates and investors are seeking standards-based frameworks and tools to help them build a compelling business case for the likely ecological, social, and financial returns from restoration.
In response, SER, in partnership with the Institute for Regional Conservation and Soul Forest, launched REVIVE last month. This six-part initiative builds on SER’s expertise for over 35 years as the leading convener and provider of global guidance on best practices in restoration. It is built around six pillars to close key gaps and scale global restoration capability:
- Restore: Create an accelerator to support 100 exemplary projects across scales and settings.
- Empower: Bolster a global network of restoration professionals through training and certification.
- Validate: Quantify the additive benefits of standards in ecological restoration and implement trusted project certification.
- Innovate: Foster innovative, integrated, and evidence-based ecological restoration practices for scale.
- Value: Catalyse investable ecological restoration that is credible, low-risk, and high impact.
- Enable: Accelerate policy development to drive adoption of ecological restoration by regulators and funders.
A springboard for accelerated action
Much of this work is already underway, offering examples of how the application of standards delivers demonstrable results, with potential to be replicated in other sectors:
For over three years, SER has collaborated with Microsoft to implement standards-based restoration. SER’s Standards provide a rigorous baseline for measuring project success, and a holistic view of outcomes that helps de-risk these programs to maximise desired impacts (Restore, Validate).
Similarly, SER has been partnering with leading global (re)insurance company SCOR since 2023 on a nature restoration and conservation insurance initiative. By insuring restoration projects on the ground, SCOR’s insurance solutions fill a critical and longstanding financial risk gap by reducing risk for financing opportunities. Consistent with the SER Standards, projects are reviewed and graded for their ‘quality’ on a scale that aligns with investment and insurance systems (e.g. ‘AAA’ to ‘C’).
SER is also a lead collaborator, with Botanic Gardens Conservation International and other partners, in the development and delivery of The Global Biodiversity Standard (TGBS). The TGBS methodology is built on the SER Standards and is applicable to a wide variety of restorative projects, including agroforestry and tree planting. This outcomes-based project certification system assesses actual gains in biodiversity from nature-based interventions and has been piloted on more than 200 sites in over 15 countries (Innovate, Validate, Value).
To drive job growth in the sector, SER has partnered with Accenture to fund an online course, Foundations of Restoration Ecology. This Massive Open Online Course will expand equitable access to education, helping build a global workforce to support well-designed restoration (Empower).
REVIVE now provides a strategic framework to help focus activity and investment in initiatives such as these for maximum impact.
Creating new opportunities for investment
By normalising standards-based approaches to restoration, expanding robust MRV, and encouraging innovative funding and policy approaches, we decrease risk, enhance transparency, and increase the likelihood of successful outcomes. Consistency and auditability create new investment opportunities while protecting businesses, their supply chains, and the communities that depend on them. REVIVE, as an industry-building initiative, aims to expand the restoration of degraded lands and waters and serve as a catalyst for high-impact, high-quality, reduced-risk projects.
For further information about REVIVE, to learn more about how standards-based restoration delivers measurable impacts and returns, or for details on how to partner with us to accelerate investment in restoration, please click on the link.
Bethanie Walder has served as the Executive Director of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) since 2015 and has more than 30 years’ experience in environmental conservation, restoration, and education. She is responsible for helping guide SER’s overall work to achieve its mission of advancing the science, practice, and policy of ecological restoration. Walder is on the lead author team for the SER International Principles and Standards and other key guidance documents for ecological restoration, and she serves on several global restoration advisory groups.
Standards-based ecological restoration can unlock capital and ensure long-term resilience, says Bethanie Walder, Executive Director, the Society for Ecological Restoration.
Business leaders increasingly understand the wide-ranging financial, commercial, reputational and social risks that the degradation of nature, loss of biodiversity, and climate change create across their organisations, supply chains and communities. Research shows that half of the world’s GDP depends on nature. Nature provides an abundance of services, including fresh water, healthy soils, pollination, and clean air. It helps protect us from the worst impacts of extreme weather. Crucially, it also provides the raw materials at the base of nearly all supply chains and an extraordinary range of natural ingredients across industries, from health and beauty to industrial products.
Ratified in 2022, Target 2 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) mandates that countries must bring 30% of their degraded lands and waters under effective restoration by 2030. Ecological restoration, which focuses on the recovery of the native ecosystems that underpin global supply chains and ecosystem services, is central to meeting this ambitious target. But to meet it, the pace and scale of investment in ecological restoration and other restorative activities (Figure 1) must accelerate.
Figure 1: The Restorative Continuum – (Gann et al. (2019)
Ecological restoration increases business resilience
Ecological restoration is a powerful nature-based solution to help mitigate and adapt to the ecological crises we face. It is also an increasingly important economic driver. According to the European Commission, the monetary value of the benefits derived from restoration is on average eight to 38 times greater than the initial investment costs. Nevertheless, there remain hurdles to making the business case for investing in restoration.
In October, at the 11th World Conference on Ecological Restoration (SER2025), Maia Reed, Global Climate Lead at Mars Petcare, outlined how ecological restoration fits into Mars’ vision for the future. “Most companies have [sustainability strategies] in place for three reasons: risk, reputation, and resiliency. …many companies end up focusing on the first two and ignoring the last…which is where restoration plays a key role.”
However, restoration projects can be long and complex, making risks hard to manage and returns hard to measure. Three priority approaches can help investors address this challenge:
Underpinning these three essential approaches is the use of recognised standards to provide transparency and consistency in ecological restoration projects.
Standards help scale investment in restoration
Until now, the field of ecological restoration has been largely funded by government programmes, non-profit organisations, and philanthropy. This foundation has yielded mature, though still evolving science, robust practice standards, and a deep professional community capable of delivering high-quality outcomes. But to scale, ecological restoration must be investable with private capital.
Investors increasingly recognise the opportunity, yet require credible mechanisms to manage risk, track performance and verify outcomes. The International Principles and Standards for Ecological Restoration (SER Standards), first launched in 2016 by the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), provide a globally recognised foundation for restoration. Standards help us understand what is and isn’t ecological restoration – this was imperative in 2016 and is even more so today – since many well-intended initiatives, especially carbon initiatives, were being labelled as restoration, but were actually causing significant environmental harm. Standards help articulate not only what restoration is, but how to ensure that investments create positive outcomes for people and nature.
Tools within the SER Standards, like the Social Benefits and Ecological Recovery Wheels, are widely applied by practitioners around the world; the latter conveys progress of recovery of ecosystem attributes compared to those of a reference model. The SER Standards provide valuable support to initiatives like TNFD, which recognises that no one single metric can capture the ‘state of nature’. The Five-star System articulated in the SER Standards, and illustrated via the wheels, provides a useful tool to help measure change in the condition of an ecosystem, including threatened species, as a result of restoration, in alignment with TNFD’s emerging approaches to assess the state of nature.
Figure 2: The Ecological Recovery Wheel (ERW) (Gann et al. 2019)
Building trust in ecological and financial returns
Increasingly, regulators and major international bodies like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognise the use of standards as a key requirement for reducing risk and uncertainty in restoration. Likewise, corporates and investors are seeking standards-based frameworks and tools to help them build a compelling business case for the likely ecological, social, and financial returns from restoration.
In response, SER, in partnership with the Institute for Regional Conservation and Soul Forest, launched REVIVE last month. This six-part initiative builds on SER’s expertise for over 35 years as the leading convener and provider of global guidance on best practices in restoration. It is built around six pillars to close key gaps and scale global restoration capability:
A springboard for accelerated action
Much of this work is already underway, offering examples of how the application of standards delivers demonstrable results, with potential to be replicated in other sectors:
For over three years, SER has collaborated with Microsoft to implement standards-based restoration. SER’s Standards provide a rigorous baseline for measuring project success, and a holistic view of outcomes that helps de-risk these programs to maximise desired impacts (Restore, Validate).
Similarly, SER has been partnering with leading global (re)insurance company SCOR since 2023 on a nature restoration and conservation insurance initiative. By insuring restoration projects on the ground, SCOR’s insurance solutions fill a critical and longstanding financial risk gap by reducing risk for financing opportunities. Consistent with the SER Standards, projects are reviewed and graded for their ‘quality’ on a scale that aligns with investment and insurance systems (e.g. ‘AAA’ to ‘C’).
SER is also a lead collaborator, with Botanic Gardens Conservation International and other partners, in the development and delivery of The Global Biodiversity Standard (TGBS). The TGBS methodology is built on the SER Standards and is applicable to a wide variety of restorative projects, including agroforestry and tree planting. This outcomes-based project certification system assesses actual gains in biodiversity from nature-based interventions and has been piloted on more than 200 sites in over 15 countries (Innovate, Validate, Value).
To drive job growth in the sector, SER has partnered with Accenture to fund an online course, Foundations of Restoration Ecology. This Massive Open Online Course will expand equitable access to education, helping build a global workforce to support well-designed restoration (Empower).
REVIVE now provides a strategic framework to help focus activity and investment in initiatives such as these for maximum impact.
Creating new opportunities for investment
By normalising standards-based approaches to restoration, expanding robust MRV, and encouraging innovative funding and policy approaches, we decrease risk, enhance transparency, and increase the likelihood of successful outcomes. Consistency and auditability create new investment opportunities while protecting businesses, their supply chains, and the communities that depend on them. REVIVE, as an industry-building initiative, aims to expand the restoration of degraded lands and waters and serve as a catalyst for high-impact, high-quality, reduced-risk projects.
For further information about REVIVE, to learn more about how standards-based restoration delivers measurable impacts and returns, or for details on how to partner with us to accelerate investment in restoration, please click on the link.
Bethanie Walder has served as the Executive Director of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) since 2015 and has more than 30 years’ experience in environmental conservation, restoration, and education. She is responsible for helping guide SER’s overall work to achieve its mission of advancing the science, practice, and policy of ecological restoration. Walder is on the lead author team for the SER International Principles and Standards and other key guidance documents for ecological restoration, and she serves on several global restoration advisory groups.
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