Why the future of economic resilience depends on measuring, valuing, and restoring the ecosystems that power our world.

The year is 2040. Imagine opening the Wall Street Journal and reading the headline:

"Natural Infrastructure Index Surpasses Global Construction Sector as Ecosystem Services Becomes One of the World's Largest Industries." 

Today, this reads like science fiction. Within a generation, it may simply describe the next great industrial transformation. 

Every wave of economic progress has been enabled by infrastructure that society chose to build, finance, and maintain because it created measurable value. Yet we have overlooked the most important infrastructure of all.

Nature.

The World Economic Forum estimates that more than $44 trillion in global economic value, over half of global GDP, is moderately or highly dependent on nature and the ecosystem services it provides. Yet we rarely think of ecosystems as critical infrastructure. 

Instead, we value the products nature yields – building materials, agricultural output, rare earth minerals that underpin the clean energy transition, biotechnology innovations, and countless other commodities. Far less attention is paid to the services ecosystems themselves provide: regulating the carbon cycle, stabilizing water systems, protecting coastlines, sustaining biodiversity, and creating the environmental conditions upon which our modern economy depends. 

As climate change accelerates, ecosystems are approaching tipping points that threaten not only biodiversity but also the economic systems that depend on these ecosystems. Today, even protected ecosystems are no longer immune to the changing climate.

It is time to recognize ecosystems for what they truly are: critical natural infrastructure; living systems that generate measurable economic value and underpin the long-term resilience of our economy.

Recognizing nature through this lens allows us to build the technologies, financial mechanisms, and markets needed to restore ecosystems at scale.

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Understanding Nature as Infrastructure

Today, we lack both the mechanisms and the mindset to value ecosystems the way we value built infrastructure. While we readily finance timber, crops, fisheries, and mineral extraction, we rarely invest in the living systems that make those outputs possible. Instead, we value the products and services that come from exploiting ecosystems, not the ecosystems themselves.

This is because our approach to managing ecosystems to date has been to observe them, understand their scientific value, and conserve what remains. When restoration does occur, it is typically bespoke, locally driven, and funded through philanthropy rather than integrated into the financial and market mechanisms that allow solutions to scale. As climate change accelerates, preserving ecosystems is no longer enough. We need technologies that allow us to systematically restore them, engineer them for resilience, and optimize the value they provide to society through a regenerative approach to resource management.

We already know how to finance infrastructure that reduces risk. The missing piece is that we have yet to recognize that ecosystems often provide the same infrastructure value, and frequently much more.

The distinction becomes clear when we look at coastal resilience. Governments routinely finance concrete seawalls because their value can be measured through lower insurance risk, reduced storm damage, and lower recovery costs. Yet healthy coral reefs and mangrove forests provide many of those same protective services while also supporting fisheries, regulating the carbon cycle, improving water quality, sustaining biodiversity, and strengthening local economies.

Healthy coral reefs can dissipate up to 97% of incoming wave energy, while mangrove forests prevent an estimated $65 billion in flood damage each year and protect approximately 15 million people worldwide. 

Replacing those natural defenses with engineered infrastructure would cost governments many billions of dollars while delivering only a fraction of the economic, ecological, and community benefits.

Valuing Ecosystem Services

According to the United Nations, every dollar invested in ecosystem restoration can generate between $7 and $30 in economic returns. Meanwhile, nature-based solutions still receive only a fraction of the investment needed to meet global climate and biodiversity goals. 

Ecosystems have always created immense economic value. What has been missing are the mechanisms to recognize, measure, and finance their resilience. Namely, if ecosystem services can be measured, they can be valued. And if they can be valued, they can be financed.

Carbon drawdown is one example. If we can accurately quantify the carbon removed and stored by forests, wetlands, and other natural systems, that value can be connected to carbon markets, creating new mechanisms to finance their restoration and long-term stewardship. 

Analyses by the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets suggest demand for carbon credits could grow more than fifteenfold by 2030, creating a market worth more than $50 billion. 

Carbon markets demonstrate what becomes possible once ecosystem services are measured with confidence.

The same principle applies to flood protection, biodiversity, fisheries, and other ecosystem services that create measurable economic value but remain largely invisible to today's markets.

Unlike traditional infrastructure, however, natural infrastructure doesn't simply maintain its value; it can increase it. As healthy ecosystems mature, they strengthen through a self-reinforcing, regenerative cycle.

 In this way, every investment in natural infrastructure generates multiple, compounding returns.

When we recognize ecosystems as drivers of economic value and resilience, restoration shifts from a philanthropic endeavor to an investment in productive infrastructure, unlocking new flows of capital to strengthen the natural systems upon which our economy depends.

Building the Natural Infrastructure Economy 

The transition from bespoke philanthropy to a market-driven natural infrastructure industry opens the door to an entirely new sector of the global economy.

Today, ecosystem restoration remains largely bespoke. Organizations often source seeds, restore habitats, monitor ecosystem health, and manage long-term stewardship themselves because the specialized technologies, companies, and supply chains needed to support that work simply do not yet exist.

A market-driven economy would look entirely different.

Specialized companies would emerge across the entire value chain, from engineered seedstocks and restoration technologies to ecological sensing platforms and AI systems capable of transforming vast ecological datasets into actionable intelligence. As specialized companies emerge across the value chain, competition would drive innovation, reduce costs, and create the efficiencies needed to restore ecosystems at scale.

Ultimately, building a natural infrastructure economy requires a new financial paradigm. Rather than focusing solely on avoiding environmental harm, capital must reward restoration, regeneration, and the technologies that make this possible.

Cultivating the Future of Natural Infrastructure

Every transformative industry begins by overcoming the barriers that prevent a bold future from becoming reality. Building an industry around natural infrastructure is no different. 

Achieving this requires scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and philanthropists working together to reduce technical risk, accelerate breakthroughs, and cultivate the technologies, business models, and market mechanisms that allow an entirely new industry to emerge.

As part of the Energy + Climate + Nature track at XPRIZE's Global Visioneering Summit this October, leading experts will convene to explore the breakthrough technologies, business models, and future XPRIZE competitions needed to engineer resilient ecosystems, measure and value ecosystem services, and cultivate a new industry around natural infrastructure.

Our ambition is to remove the critical barriers that stand between today's reality and a future where natural infrastructure is recognized, valued, and restored as a foundational pillar of long-term economic resilience.

Perhaps then, that imagined Wall Street Journal headline will no longer read like science fiction. It will mark the moment we recognized that the world's most valuable infrastructure was never something we built. It was something we finally learned to value, invest in, and restore.