Series launch: Making Money Work for Landscapes

"The essence of finance isn't money itself - it's the relational health around it."

That was one of the provocations offered by James Vaccaro, CEO of RePattern, during a recent Gerana Gathering conversation.

We opened with a Beautiful Question:

What would it take to make money work for landscapes?

Finance is often presented as the missing ingredient in efforts to restore nature and build resilient landscapes. Yet across business, finance and land stewardship, a more nuanced picture is emerging.

The issue is not simply the availability of money. It is how finance is structured, sequenced, governed and connected to the realities of place.

Over the past year, Gerana's Market Opportunity Scoping (MOS) research has explored what it would take for companies to act together in the landscapes they depend on. Through conversations with 41 senior leaders across 34 companies, alongside practitioners from finance, land stewardship and nature conservation, a recurring pattern has emerged:

Business resilience is increasingly shaped by the health of landscapes. Yet coordinated action remains difficult.

As part of this exploration, Gerana convened six finance practitioners from across banking, investment, conservation finance and systems change to share candid reflections on how money actually behaves inside the systems shaping landscapes.

Their perspectives have now been released through a new series:

Making Money Work for Landscapes: Perspectives from Finance.

The series opens with James Vaccaro's provocation, Finance as a Craft, Not a Commodity.

Rather than asking where the money is, James invites us to ask a different question:

"How do we build the relationships that finance is meant to serve?"

It is a perspective that resonates strongly with the wider themes emerging through the MOS research.

Across the six contributions, several consistent signals appear:

money is present, but often misaligned
finance works through relationships, not transactions
landscapes expose a scale mismatch between ecosystem realities and project-based finance
risk is increasingly visible but not yet fully internalised
regeneration requires multiple forms of capital over time
meaningful decisions ultimately sit with boards, investors and CFOs

Taken together, these perspectives suggest a shift in thinking.

Perhaps the challenge is not simply mobilising more capital for nature. Perhaps it is designing systems that enable different forms of capital, governance, knowledge and relationships to work together over time.

This thinking forms the basis of the first Gerana Dialogue, taking place virtually on 19 June ahead of London Climate Action Week.

Designed as a participatory conversation rather than a traditional webinar, the dialogue will bring together people from business, finance, land stewardship and civil society to explore where finance works, where it breaks down, and what might enable more coordinated action in landscapes.

Because if landscapes are where resilience is built, then understanding how money moves through them may be one of the most important conversations we can have.

We hope you'll join the conversation and follow the series as we release all perspectives in the lead-up to the Gerana Dialogue on the 19 June.

Further reading