At this year’s Climate Hub Davos, Innovate 4 Nature co-hosted the session ‘Regenerate! Building Nature-Positive Futures for People, Cities, and Planet’ alongside the Global Regenerative Innovation Alliance, PDIE Group, The Future is Fungi Award, and IKED — hosted by GreenUp, and generously supported by B Capital Partners.
The conversation brought together innovators, investors, policymakers, and practitioners to explore one central question: If nature-based solutions already exist, what’s holding them back from scaling?
The answer was clear.
The bottleneck isn’t innovation, it’s alignment.
Across the built environment and infrastructure sectors, proven nature-positive solutions are already on the market. From mycelium-based insulation and bio-based construction materials to circular water systems and regenerative urban projects, the ideas are ready.
What’s missing is a system designed to support them.
Instead, projects are caught between misaligned timelines and structures:
Investors often seek fast returns, while nature-based infrastructure needs time to mature.
Regulation frequently lags behind innovation, leaving regenerative solutions without clear approval pathways.
Communities are pushed toward short-term, extractive options when sustainable alternatives struggle to compete on speed or certainty.
As a result, funding exists — but can’t always be deployed. Financial logic and ecological logic operate on different clocks.
Regulation, incentives, and proof points
The session highlighted regulation as one of the most powerful levers for change. Nature-based infrastructure needs clear incentives to thrive, while conventional, fossil-heavy approaches must begin to face meaningful penalties.
At the same time, local success stories can become powerful catalysts for scale.
From Rotterdam’s stadium wastewater system to emerging bio-based materials for buildings, real-world projects already demonstrate what’s possible. These proof points can serve as blueprints — showing how regenerative solutions work in practice and how they can be replicated across cities and regions.
The opportunity now lies in redesigning the system around what already works:
using regulation strategically
creating the right financial incentives
turning local innovation into scalable models
From partnerships to impact
More than anything, Regenerate! underscored that moving from ideas to impact will depend less on inventing something new, and more on building partnerships that allow proven solutions to thrive.
By bringing together diverse stakeholders, the session focused on transforming shared insights into collaboration, and collaboration into action. Because scaling nature-based infrastructure isn’t about waiting for better ideas. It’s about building systems that finally let them grow.
We’re grateful to our partners and contributors for helping make this conversation possible, and to everyone who joined us in Davos to advance nature-positive futures for people, cities, and planet.
You can watch the full session via GreenUp’s YouTube channel (January 20, timestamp 8:12:44).
We thank all of our panelists for their contributions and expertise: Christian Schmitz (GRIA), Susanne Gløersen (The Future is Fungi), Ingrid Andersson (IKED), Barbara Weber (B Capital Partners), Maxime Nassour (BNCI), Prof. Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Susan Tomasko, Carlos Alvarez (Club of Rome), Madiha Hasan (International Board Advisor), and Kieran Dartée (FieldFactors).
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