The Nature Bank Leads Global Call for Systemic Adaptation Finance at GGGWeek 2025
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Dr. Gene Leon underscores the need to finance resilience as a system, not a silo, during high-level sessions on adaptation and sustainable finance.
From October 27 to 31, global leaders, policymakers, and technical experts gathered in Seoul for the Global Green Growth Week 2025 (GGGWeek), hosted by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). Under the theme “Innovation in a World in Transition,” the week-long conference explored practical pathways to drive sustainable, inclusive, and climate-resilient growth.
Amid this global dialogue, the Nature Bank, also known as the Development Bank for Resilient Prosperity (DBRP) joined the conversation, represented by Dr. Gene Leon, Executive Director, whose interventions underscored a systems-based approach to financing resilience that integrates nature, climate, and human prosperity at the core of economic design.
As countries and institutions work to align green growth with real-world investment flows, the Nature Bank’s participation at GGGWeek highlighted how innovative financial frameworks can turn resilience into a measurable, investable outcome. Dr. Leon contributed to two pivotal sessions that bridged adaptation planning, sustainable finance, and infrastructure development, demonstrating how the bank’s mission to finance prosperity that lasts is being translated into action.
Adaptation Planning and the Scaling of Adaptation Finance
During the Adaptation and Resilience track, Dr Leon joined the high-level session “Adaptation Planning and the Scaling of Adaptation Finance”, which also marked the launch of the Sustainable Adaptation Finance Architecture (SAFA) Facility. In his intervention, he stressed that the challenge is not only to mobilise more money, but to change the way finance is conceived and deployed, from fragmented “blue/green/climate” silos to a systems-control approach that treats the balance sheet of the planet as the central organising principle for development finance.
Drawing on the Nature Bank’s paradigm, Dr Leon argued that adaptation finance must start by defining the system we are trying to make resilient. This means moving beyond GDP towards measurement, verification, and certification frameworks that capture real wealth, including human, produced, and natural capital- and embed standards, compliance, and regulatory elements around them. Only when resilience outcomes are clearly defined and measured can finance be aligned with them coherently and transparently.
He then highlighted the need for different finance, not just more finance. This involves recognising natural capital as an asset on national balance sheets, developing nature credits and other instruments that reflect the services ecosystems provide, and unlocking the value of planetary resources that already exist. In this framework, nature-based solutions are not add-ons to traditional projects; they are core components of a regenerative economic model that balances planetary well-being with economic growth and uses systems risk-return metrics as the basis for creating new, bankable adaptation opportunities.
Finally, Dr. Leon underscored that scaling adaptation will depend on implementation capacity and structured partnerships. He called for multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, multi-source, and multi-instrument coalitions that can:
Augment what already exists (including reimagining the system, addressing capacity to repay, and mobilising instruments such as SDRs),
Do more with what countries already have (improving domestic resource mobilisation, refining what is considered “bankable”, and strengthening local financial ecosystems), and
Improve operational functioning (integrating technology with institutional and human capacity to reduce risk).
Through this system's lens, the Nature Bank positions adaptation finance as mission-oriented, interlinked financing of integrated investment programs (vs. financing of isolated projects) that promote resilient ecosystems in which people, prosperity, and planet are managed together as one coherent whole.
Green Contracts, Resilient Outcomes: Embedding Nature and Climate into Infrastructure Development
Later in the week, Dr. Leon participated in the Sustainable Finance session, contributing to the panel “Green Contracts, Resilient Outcomes: Embedding Nature and Climate into Infrastructure Development.”
Reflecting Nature Bank’s founding principles, Dr. Leon outlined how the Bank proposes to finance infrastructure as a system, not a silo, optimizing human, natural, and produced capital to achieve durable, inclusive prosperity. He presented three operational levers driving this transformation:
Measurement and standards: introducing nature-adjusted return metrics and aligning verification with beyond-GDP wealth accounting.
Incentives and instruments: structuring resilience-linked finance and tokenized ecosystem receivables to crowd in private capital.
Capacity and partnerships: localizing resilience by co-developing skills, data systems, and governance with regional institutions.
He argued that when “we pay for verified resilience, markets will supply it,” calling for a shift from fragmented, risk-averse systems to coherent portfolios that value long-term stability over short-term returns.
Throughout GGGWeek, the Nature Bank’s interventions reinforced a unifying vision: prosperity that fails at the first shock is not prosperity. By embedding resilience, nature, and inclusion into the core of finance, DBRP is redefining what it means to invest for impact.
Through common standards, aligned incentives, and localized capacity, the Bank is turning the global investment gap into an innovation pipeline. These financing outcomes endure across generations and within the planet’s safe operating space.