Valuing Nature: From Local Lakes to Global Markets

This event explores the growing intersection between natural capital, biodiversity, and financial markets through two compelling perspectives.

Local Lake (Part1):

Lough Neagh is the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland. However, it is turning green, choked by recurrent, toxic cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms that threaten public health, local recreation, and commercial fisheries. This is more than just an ecological tragedy; it represents the severe economic depreciation of a massive natural capital asset.

To address this crisis, we explore how to apply site-level economic valuation to quantify the lake's total economic and natural capital asset value, identifying which specific ecosystem services are most critical to preserve.

Global Markets (Part 2):

Such localized ecological realities lead us to ask how nature-related transition risks reverberate across international capital markets. We firstly investigate whether emerging biodiversity-themed exchange-traded funds can deliver a "dual win", functioning as effective market-linked vehicles that track broad benchmarks without sacrificing risk-adjusted returns. We secondly move to agricultural derivatives, where we examine whether daily biodiversity news sentiment actually influences the term structure of commodity futures.

Ultimately, we seek to understand if global financial markets are actively pricing long-term, nature-related transition risks directly into forward pricing structures.

This event will automatically close midnight the day before or if its fully booked