Season 3 Episode 2: The Gold Standard: Valuing Intact Nature While We Fix What's Broken Artwork

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Join David Meyers and Kim Bonine as they speak with some of the world’s most innovative thinkers about how to transform economic incentive systems to work for the natural world and the people in it. The incentive systems that drive our behavior – from those that we've created through laws, commerce, and culture to those that evolved over our history on the planet – have led us to take Nature for granted. 4Nature guests are committed to restructuring financial, economic, and social incentives to be more nature positive, and transforming the role humanity plays within Nature.

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Season 3 Episode 2: The Gold Standard: Valuing Intact Nature While We Fix What's Broken

May 06, 2025 • Conservation Finance Alliance & Conservation Strategy Fund • Season 3 • Episode 2

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What if we've built conservation markets backward? Mike Korchinsky, founder of Wildlife Works, reveals how we've created elaborate systems to pay for reducing destruction while assigning zero value to what remains intact. After pioneering REDD+ carbon credits that moved millions to indigenous communities, Korchinsky is now challenging both corporate leaders and environmental activists with a provocative framework: "The market is the worst form of conservation finance - except for all the others." His work with Amazonian indigenous peoples has produced a revolutionary financial instrument that values functioning ecosystems rather than just measuring avoided harm. Join this philosophical journey through the carbon market's turbulent history to discover why the future of biodiversity finance might depend on abandoning guilt-based "footprint" approaches for something radically simpler: recognizing and rewarding what communities have protected for millennia.

Links:

Wildlife Works website

The Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project

Biodiversity Stewardship Unit/methodology information

Verra

CFA's Nature Credit Task Force