When we hear about funds being set up to protect nature, it's just the start of something bigger. We need people like Phoebe to make things happen. As a Nature Associate at the Green Finance Institute, Phoebe engages with stakeholders across various sectors to develop ideas and solutions in nature finance, such as farmers' access to nature markets and biodiversity net gain (BNG).

Having worked in traditional finance, Phoebe capitalised her knowledge in how the system works and her interpersonal skills. This has enabled her to thrive in a startup environment within an emerging sector that is nature finance, where she needs to take initiatives in setting up and leading projects.

Phoebe reads many non-fiction books for her work. She recommends Land Healer by Jake Fiennes. It’s about rethinking farming and our relationship with the natural world. For switching off, she likes to dive into the fictional world. She recently finished The Vegan, a story of a finance professional trying to offset his bad actions by becoming a vegan.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Yongsi: What is Nature Associate? I haven't heard of this job title anywhere else other than in Green Finance Institute. So what does your job involve?

Phoebe: Broadly, a Nature Associate helps to develop and deliver the ideas and solutions that are going to help channel private finance into nature.

It might be helpful to do a bit of scene setting, especially with things like COP28 wrapped up. You may hear about lots of targets and initiatives and mega coalitions that investors and companies and even governments announce for investing into nature. You wonder what might be stopping all this capital and firepower from going into nature? It seems like there's a wall of billions and billions of dollars and pounds that's ready to be deployed, but it's not flowing into nature the way it needs to.

What we do is we bridge those gaps between the committed capital and impactful solutions that are going to deliver nature restoration and nature positive outcomes on the ground. At the Green Finance Institute (GFI), we don't actually have a product to sell or a balance sheet that we lend against. What we do is we go sector by sector, including nature, to break down the barriers that are stopping this capital. Then we create the enabling environment and financial solutions that are going to unlock that capital.

My job in particular is to focus on certain areas within nature finance, such as farmers' access to nature markets or biodiversity net gain, which is shortly going to be made compulsory for property developers in England*. I work with all the relevant stakeholders across this space to develop ideas and solutions that are going to move the dial at scale. In practice, this might be a financial solution like a development fund, but it also might be a key change in policy or even an educational resource for the wider market. So very broad. Likewise, I haven't heard of any nature associates.

Yongsi: In one of our previous episodes, we talked about natural capital management in the real estate setting. Does your work also involve natural capital management, but in the finance setting?

Phoebe: Yeah, it's definitely in the same arena. Savills is a great organisation, and they're working hard to make sure their client base, that is farmers and estate managers in the natural capital team, that they're aware of the new opportunities in natural capital. We've actually approached them before on what we call the supply side of the nature finance equation. I was really interested to listen to Lucy's podcast.

A couple of differences between GFI and Seville. One is while we work with the supply side, like farmers and landowners, we've also got pieces of work that are much more demand side focused. For example, Lucy mentioned the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, the TNFD for short. The GFI is the global secretariat of the TNFD. We also convened the UK National Consultation Group. We were charged with galvanising UK financial institutions and corporates to feed into the TNFD while it was developing before launching in September 2023. Now we have over 1300 businesses signed up to that group. We're also on a separate piece of work. We're also working with the Bank of England to quantify the risks of natural collapse across different sectors and what that might mean for GDP shocks.

Those are two examples I could give, where these sectors, businesses, corporates and financial institutions have not really embedded natural capital as a way of thinking and as a way of doing business. But we absolutely need to help the wider UK economy transition to this way of functioning. At the GFI, we've got such a broad range of stakeholders. It's a real pleasure to work with the supply side, that is the farmers and the landowners on the ground, as well as the financial sector, as you say.

The other difference is the way we operate on a commercial basis. I mentioned before that GFI doesn't have a particular product or a service or a balance sheet that we lend against. That can be difficult to put into words - when people hear Green Finance Institute, they immediately think that we have money or that we're a consultancy. But as I explained, we tend to pick particular sector barriers of working. Then we come up with ideas for identifying barriers and solutions.

The way we get funded is we typically have a philanthropic body or a government body, or perhaps a corporation that's willing to fund us for that particular programme of work. Everything we do is for the wider market and not for individual services for individual clients. It can be difficult to explain that to people who automatically think of you as a financial organisation, but we definitely get programmatic funding from people who want to see this work deployed to the wider market.

Yongsi: That’s a helpful recap about the Green Finance Institute! You said your job is to channel funds into nature restoration and conservation. Could you tell us more about your day-to-day routine?

Phoebe: Such a huge part of my day is simply talking to other people and finding out their thoughts. I know that sounds very straightforward, very basic. In GFI, we have specialism and expertise, but we are only as good as the people we work with. So a big part of our offering to this space is how we convene people together on a journey of thinking about ways to address bigger problems.

For day-to-day, I could be organising a series of roundtables with experts or going to farmer cluster meetings to talk about their thoughts on nature markets. I interview and analyse projects and businesses. I think about what makes them successful and what are their barriers in, for example, accessing forms of nature finance. There’s research and reading naturally - I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with just hunkering down and getting through a stack of reports on a particular topic.

There might also be a lot of project management in my day-to-day on a potential solution. For example, we've recently created a website for farmers to learn more about nature markets. I now have a much deeper understanding of website development, what makes it effective and how we can improve the way a website presents information in order to make it most accessible.

So a huge part of my day to day is talking to other people, but also basic project management on things that people have come up with as ideas and turning them into a reality.

Yongsi: I totally understand that talking to people is not as easy as it sounds. It's particularly because of this podcast. When I started this podcast, I thought just chatting, how difficult could it be? But as I'm doing it, I’ve realised there's so much more going on behind the scenes if you want to have a meaningful conversation to present to the audience.

Phobe: Yeah, absolutely.

Yongsi: What is the most memorable project that you've worked on?

Phobe: Last year was a great year, but we finished it with a trip to Dundreggan in the Scottish Highlands. We organised for a group of financial institution representatives to come up to the Scottish Highlands to go see a particular business that was nature-based and working with nature markets. They had a special focus on community engagement and community benefit sharing, which is a very emotive topic in nature finance, because the concept of a just transition very much applies to nature. If you are going to put money into nature and restore it, you also need to take local communities on this journey. Make sure they are not shut out from land ownership and the wealth being generated, and that you're building a thriving economy as well as a thriving natural environment.

We took around 20 financial sector representatives. We put together this fantastic agenda where we were hearing from a charity called Trees for Life, as well as ecologists, local community members. The Scottish Government  also presented their work. It was a fantastic 2/3-day trip set in the most gorgeous setting of the Scottish Highlands. It was extremely emotive to hear about the struggles that the local community had had and the history behind - Scotland's land ownership - why it's such an important topic to take communities with you on this journey.

I think it was quite impactful to the way that people were thinking. It was just good to remember that while we are focused on finance and private finance in that role, it's also very important to capture the social side of nature finance and sustainability in general. So that was the highlight of my year.

Yongsi: Wow, sounds fascinating. While you were describing the trip, all of these memories of me hiking in Scotland came back, and I just imagined having conversations in front of such fascinating sceneries. It's amazing.

Phoebe: We had these great conversations that day. A local artist came and presented her work and then a local musician. Then we drank Scottish gin from a particular company that's focused on using natural and local ingredients in their production. The whole thing was just an amazing experience. We're hoping to build more on that kind of community engagement side this year going forward and the social aspects of nature finance. Probably the most memorable project I've worked on. Hopefully we can expand that work this year.

Yongsi: I imagine what you're doing is quite different from what you did, which was in traditional banking. What prompted you to shift your career path?

Phoebe: My job was in traditional banking. I was a strategy manager working on the bank's distribution strategy, such as how it connects with the customers and delivers products and services. It was intellectually interesting. That's definitely a worthwhile thing to pursue because everyone needs access to banking services and for their financial health.

But I had to explore what motivated me on a personal level. That wasn't it necessarily. At the same time, I was volunteering in the bank’s sustainability network that was established by some friends of mine. I had my main job, and then I had this volunteering side job. But I ended up enjoying my side job more than my actual job. After a year of volunteering in this network, I simply said to myself that the writing is on the wall. I need to move to sustainability if I really want to forge a career that I am excited about.

Then I needed to think about what specific parts of sustainability really interested me because sustainability in itself is such a vast concept. The best way to shift my job successfully from something completely unrelated to sustainability is probably to pick an area that truly motivates me and then build my subject matter expertise around it.

I picked nature because it was deeply frustrating to me that everyone in my space in banking was talking about net zero and reducing carbon emissions, which is so important. No one was really paying attention to the biodiversity crisis, the water crisis, all these other precious ecosystem services that we need to survive. I made a decision that day when I realised that was really bothering me - OK, you want to move to nature finance particularly.

Yongsi: Do you think it's because carbon, in a sense, it's easier to put down a number of how much emission? But for biodiversity we're still trying to come up with a way of how to put a number on it. So there's ecosystem service accounting but it is quite controversial still.

Phoebe: Exactly. Maybe this is a controversial statement, because I know that a lot of work has and continues to go into making sure the metric of tons of CO₂ equivalent is up to date. But you're right in that that's just one metric. We can say this is a common polluter. We can measure it in a standardised way now across all the other greenhouse gas emissions. People can aim for this one KPI, if you're going to use corporate slang for that.

But nature is incredibly location specific. You'll have different metrics, thousands of different metrics to measure the health of a natural environment. To give an example, I think the TNFD, when they were developing the framework, they had to think about the metrics that they were proposing. They did all the research and the metrics work stream within the TNFD said, OK, we've got 10,000 metrics that companies and banks could use to standardise their nature impact and dependency reporting. But that's not very helpful. So people do tend to shy away from the natural crisis because it's so vast and complex.

Yongsi: I think in a sense, it shows that nature is really doing us an invaluable service. It's just so hard to calculate.

Phoebe: Even within this space, people have healthy disagreements about what is best to focus on. I know people who, for example, work in the Rivers Trust. They are very passionate about water. They say, not necessarily the view of the Rivers Trust, that water is the key thing. We have to figure out the water crisis. Water is the root of all life. But then other people say maybe it's the biodiversity crisis and we need a standardised way of measuring biodiversity species abundance. So you get this debate within the space even about what is most effective to focus on. It's fantastic that I've learned so much. And you're right - all these precious ecosystem services stem from a vast natural environment that's done so much for us, but we've traditionally taken it for granted.

Yongsi: Thank you for working on it! Besides the volunteering, was that enough to prepare for your career change? If not, what did you do?

Phoebe: Looking back, I think there are some classic recommendations that people can do. It's reading, reading, reading, listening to podcasts, talking to people. You can find friends of friends and learn about their jobs and their recommendations. I don't think there's anything stopping you from messaging people on LinkedIn. Just ask if you could maybe have half an hour of their time to pick their brains. People have done that to me. I was lucky enough that I had a good list of contacts already who worked in sustainability. I've had people approach me completely out of the blue on LinkedIn, because they've seen my focus on nature finance. They say, I really want to learn about this. Because I sympathise that this is a tough space to crack for someone completely outside of it, I tend to give them that time, which is nice.

Yongsi: Yeah, I can verify that.

Phoebe: No, I was delighted to get your message. Brilliant stuff.

Yongsi: Thank you! So what are the transferable skills from traditional banking, the job that you worked before, to this green finance sector that is more focused on sustainability?

Phoebe: In my [previous] job, I did a lot of stakeholder management. I had an idea of what good governance looked like in terms of how to speak to senior stakeholders within a large bank, how to present information effectively to get your point across in a concise and engaging way. Factual writing has come up a lot and then research, so being able to congest a lot of information and give the relevant highlights. That's incredibly important when you're working with senior stakeholders and anyone. Really to get your point across and to make the best use of your time.

I think those are kind of classic ones that a lot of people will mention. But my background in banking has definitely helped me in terms of my knowledge of how banks work and even the culture of them, how people within large and established organisations think and how it can be difficult for such organisations to delve into the green finance space. That's incredibly important.

It goes back to stakeholder management and good governance, which is how do you get people to pay attention to what you're saying and how do you get them to invest their time and their energy. A lot of the time we are just creating initiatives with the input of many different people. But you need to respect people's time and that they have their own jobs to focus on. So bringing them along on this journey with you of developing a concept, developing a financial solution or a wider market solution was something that I had experience with working in the strategy space. That was hugely important to demonstrate when I first joined GFI. At the same time I've also learned a lot more about that particular skill, having been in this role now for two years.

Yongsi: So for the transferable skills you highlighted stakeholder management as well as some interpersonal skills and you also mentioned some soft skills. You also mentioned these soft skills in your LinkedIn. But how did you identify these were the skills you would need when you switch to green finance? Because in job descriptions, they don't list all these items.

Phoebe: It was more of a realisation that came with the culture shift of my new job. I went from working for NatWest Bank, which was a longstanding organisation of tens of thousands of employees to the Green Finance Institute, which is small. When I say small, I think I was the 21st employee of the GFI when I joined two years ago. A startup in effect, because it had only been going for two years when I joined.

That culture change was so important for realising what soft skills or what skills in general that I needed. For example, I've been given a lot more autonomy in this role compared to my last, so self-management is really important. When you join a new job, you might have a really fast paced team that can give you a certain amount of work. But then there may be periods where in the first few months you find yourself with not a clear idea on how you should use your time in the day because there's not a discrete, concrete task that you've been given. So self-management is really important in saying this is how I'm going to use my time. This is how I think it will pay off. That's true of today. I might delve into a particular topic because I have a sense that it would be good to research this before it comes up elsewhere.

There’s emotional intelligence. I mentioned it in my LinkedIn profile. That's really understanding how to communicate best with people and how to recognise their needs and their wants and how to make sure they feel that they're getting something out of the conversation. Very important because you're talking with a wide range of stakeholders in this job. Making sure that they feel that they've taken something away is really important.

Strategic planning is really important, too. At the bank I was working on a particular area of strategy but I was working within a team within an organisation that had a clearer line of the bank's general strategy and its  long-term aims. I wouldn't say singing from the same hymn sheet but we all had the same language that we spoke with and the same idea of the KPIs that we were working towards. But in a company like GFI, you may have an idea of that and it's a good thing. You can think strategically more about what you want to do to really have an impact in this space. I'm really grateful to work at a company like GFI where I'm in a position to say, OK, strategically, I think we should focus on this if we're really going to move private finance into nature at scale. That's a skill that I've worked more on in my current role for sure.

Yongsi: It's not just whether you have the skills to be able to do a certain job, but also you need to understand whether you would enjoy it, right? Whether you would, for example, enjoy this culture, you would enjoy being your own boss, basically.

Phoebe: There are times when it can be very tough to think you're in a sort of wild murky landscape. You're doing this work. You're not sure what it's going to look like as a finished output and whether that output's going to have proper impact. You've really got to do the legwork in developing those ideas and make sure that you're including everyone, making them feel involved and you're also being wise about your own time. But that's not for everyone. Some people want a discrete, identifiable product or service to sell. That's what gets them out of bed. Or they're helping individual customers more with whatever they need. It's really important to recognize that and to figure out what makes you tick.

Yongsi: What do you think of your quality of life now? Especially compared to traditional banking, which has long working hours and is very intense, fast-paced. How is your work-life balance right now?

Phoebe: I would say my work-life balance is very good. I feel really blessed to work in a space that I feel so passionately about, even in the days where you know there's negative news. In sustainability, you can have very gloomy days where you read the headlines of the news about the state of our environment and climate and you get really disheartened. But I see my job as an antidote to that, in that I can say I'm working on something that I feel very passionately about, that we definitely need to solve. I work with amazing people. I love my team. I love my company culture and the people that we work with across different sectors. I feel so lucky to hear more about their thoughts and their experiences.

The working hours can be actually, I'd say, tougher than my last role, but that's actually linked to how I feel about the job. I'm definitely guilty of spending longer on a project because I feel so passionately about it. I remember saying to my friends one day, I wish there were two of me so I can work on these two separate projects I'm thinking of right now. My friends were saying that, you think you want the two of you to work more. That's kind of sad, Phoebe. I was like, oh, maybe it is.

That's a sign that I truly love my job, but it's important to switch off and to have hobbies outside of work. One thing I've learned is not to get into this vicious cycle of working longer hours and then being less productive the following morning. It's definitely beneficial for you to have a better work-life balance for the sake of your work as well as for yourself. The trick is to find a topic, but also a team that you feel blessed to work with, because the right team can make an entire difference to your work-life balance.

Yongsi: I didn't expect that you would say it's more intense than traditional banking. But I get it, because you are very driven by sustainability, which is quite urgent.

Phoebe: It might be you're putting together a paper or a series of events based on a particular topic, for example. Then something will happen - a key piece of government legislation is announced or a confidence crisis like what we saw with carbon credits last year and the methodology is questioned. You can say, oh God, this puts an entire new lens on what I'm working on. How do I need to change what I'm doing to reflect that and proactively spot those changes coming down the line as well? That's a big part of it. While there can be very long hours in banking, I also have had a couple of long sessions at my current work, because we operate in this very fluid space. But that’s just part and parcel of working for a company or a job that you’re very passionate about.

Yongsi: Speaking of two Phoebes, it might not be impossible in the future with cloning and AI.

Phoebe: Yeah, but my friends did take me aside and they were like, that's really sad. You should go rock climbing or to the cinema or do something that's completely not work related. That's good advice as well. Do something completely separate because you don't have to have it saturate every part of your life.

Yongsi: That's true. I mean, you're trying to make the world a better place, so you should also try to enjoy living in it as well. Who knows, all these not so work-relevant activities might actually give you new perspectives, new knowledge that can potentially benefit your work.

Phoebe: Back to that emotional intelligence point. Sometimes people don't want to talk about work. They want to find out who they're working with, so you can bond over shared experiences or shared ways of thinking or completely different ways of thinking.

Yongsi: Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, you might as well just work with robots, right? I mean, even AIs nowadays, they are quite colourful characters. Anyway, back to green finance. What do you think of the job opportunities in the sector? Is there a healthy demand for workers in green finance?

Phoebe: 100%. Two years ago when I joined, I could see the demand for green finance jobs in that people wanted to hire people in green finance. This trend was only going to grow exponentially. I didn't hear so many people solely focused on nature two years ago. I was one of the fewer people in a very lucky position to work in a job focusing on nature finance. Now, not only in green finance overall, but also in nature finance, I can see there are a lot more people hiring, looking to develop expertise in ecology, policy. Lawyer is a good example. Two years ago, I really struggled to find lawyers with natural capital expertise. But now I have a really good list of contacts of companies and firms that have launched their own teams and brought that to the fore.

In green finance in general, I don't see this trend going down. I think people are only going to want to build out their green finance teams more. And that may be more difficult [for getting a job in the sector]. You might be expected to have an expertise in green finance when applying for a job, because it's getting to be more of an established space. But I don't think that's going to be true overall, because people do want these transferable skills. They want these experiences from different sectors to be brought into green finance.

I would say that if you are looking to work in green finance, definitely work hard in your current job to figure out how to best demonstrate those transferable skills. Get those examples of things like stakeholder management, conflict resolution, adaptability - all these skills and experiences that you can take in your current role. Those same skills will also be demanded in green finance. I think it's a good idea to focus on that as well.

Yongsi: Yes, and also listen to our podcast!

Phoebe: Listen to Greensider, exactly. Get those thoughts and experiences of people who are in the space. Hopefully that will energise you to make this transition.

Yongsi: Just a reminder for our audience, you're welcome to post any follow-up questions about this episode or any other episodes on our social media platforms. Now before we wrap up, Phoebe, do you have any recommendations for our book club that aims to learn lessons about how to build a more sustainable future?

Phoebe: I've actually got two book recommendations because I read a lot of nonfiction as part of my job, but I also like to switch off and read fiction. Can I give two?

Yongsi: Absolutely. We're all ears. We've done only one novel in the book club, which is Ministry for the Future. But yes, fiction is a very interesting genre to talk about sustainability.

Phoebe: For my non-fiction book I think I would recommend Land Healer. That is a book by Jake Fiennes who is very much on the farmer land manager side. He talks about his experiences of coming to realise that his job needs to reflect the way we need to take care of the environment. I really enjoyed that.

In terms of fiction reading, I've just finished The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein. That is a story about a man who does something terrible and then tries to figure out ways of balancing his bad actions with good actions. It's almost a satire that he's a finance guy and he's figuring out actually what is morality to him and how he can make amends and what does he need to do with his life. It's a really short read but one that I think people would enjoy because it's representative of where we are now and how we think about morality. It's called The Vegan because he decides he wants to be a vegan. When I say that book title to people and they think it's about veganism. It's actually much more complex than that. That was a good book to switch off, with the way people think about how their actions balance.