MMW Perspective 2: Greening Financial Flows, Not Just Creating New Ones

“Banks don't lack influence. What they lack is a clear, financeable demand signal for nature.”

Nature finance is often discussed as though the challenge is simply finding more money.

In the second perspective from Gerana's Making Money Work for Landscapes series, Jenny McInnes (Ostara Collective) challenges that assumption.

Drawing on her experience across banking, climate finance and public–private collaboration, Jenny argues that the problem is not a lack of financial capital. Banks already finance the vast majority of global trade, commodity supply chains and agricultural production. The real challenge is that demand for nature finance remains fragmented, poorly articulated and rarely framed in ways that align with how financial institutions actually work.

Rather than focusing solely on new funds, new instruments or the latest innovations, Jenny encourages us to pay greater attention to the much larger task of greening existing financial flows.

This requires more than policy commitments and sustainability targets. It demands a clearer understanding of commercial realities, stronger demand signals from the real economy, and new ways of aggregating opportunities across supply chains, actors and financing mechanisms.

An important message throughout the piece is that nature finance will only scale when it is understood not as a corporate responsibility initiative, but as a question of supply chain resilience and strategic business risk.

For anyone interested in the intersection of finance, nature, trade and landscape resilience, Jenny offers a valuable reminder that the future of nature finance may depend less on creating entirely new flows of capital and more on redirecting the flows that already shape land use today.

This article is the second in a six-part series exploring how money behaves inside the systems shaping landscapes.

We hope it sparks reflection, discussion and perhaps a few new questions of your own.