ESG Conference 2025: a conversation with Lauren Boccardi

Emily Morison (EM): Lauren Boccardi leads the legal team supporting The Nature Conservancy’s impact investment portfolio. Before joining the Conservancy, Lauren served at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), where she most recently served as the Deputy Assistant General Counsel for USAID’s Bureau for Food Security and for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. Her work at USAID covered private sector engagement, impact investing, legislation and policy, and Middle East issues. Prior to USAID, Lauren worked on a wide range of corporate transactions as a corporate lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton, focusing in particular on energy and environmental work.

Lauren, can you tell us about your work at the Nature Conservancy to promote positive climate and biodiversity outcomes through sustainable finance?

Lauren Boccardi (LB): At the Nature Conservancy, we have some very ambitious 2030 goals that we're trying to achieve in the next few years around climate, biodiversity, people outcomes, a range of things. And so we try and structure financial products to really achieve those objectives in a meaningful way. And I'd say our innovations or our products come really into two major buckets. One is in the private equity space; we're involved in a number of impact funds that are investing and trying to achieve metrics and outcomes in that space. And then we also have a nature bonds programme that works to address the sovereign debt crisis that a number of developing countries face, as well as the climate and biodiversity crises. So we help governments refinance their sovereign debt at the lower interest rate and channel those savings towards conservation. And they agree to certain conservation commitments that they'll achieve over the term of the financing that really are measurable gains towards their international commitments on conservation, conserving areas of their ocean or terrestrial and freshwater areas, and really achieve our outcomes as an organisation.

EM: And what do you see as the role of lawyers in this sustainable finance space?

LB: Well, all the work that we do has pretty much not been done before. We have to pull together different areas of law. Just the basic ability to negotiate a transaction and then there can be lots of interlays of international standards, whether that's biodiversity or climate, there can also be impacts on people. So, Indigenous people and local communities, how laws interplay, very much comes into play with all of those issues, as well as the international overlay. And so, you really have to be a generalist and be able to, as a lawyer, pivot and think creatively in all those areas, put them together. I often think of myself as putting together the pieces of a puzzle, to try and put together a deal and really help all the parties be incentivised together to achieve the same outcomes.

Sara Carnegie (SC): Do you find any particular challenges in being able to persuade people of the merits of this or do you find that the landscape has and continues to evolve in a positive direction? Because I know politically we have challenges around these issues right now and we've been speaking about those, but from the finance perspective, how have you seen things perhaps going over the last six months?

LB: I think that there's a moment in time now where everybody is thinking about what they're doing and what they are striving for and so in some sense we see a pause by some players who are trying to figure out what their priorities are going to be going forward. I think we do continue to see a lot of interest in financial structures that make sense, right? And so that's really what underpins, I think, impact investing as a sustainable solution to some of these problems over time. And I think particularly a company, for example, that's looking at a solution for supply chain issues, they're doing something that makes sense for their business, right? And so, whether you call it addressing risk or whether you call it addressing climate-related issues, market forces are still there. Whether it will be the same players or different players, whether some players will engage differently, I think absolutely there will be players engaging differently. And so, I think this is a moment of creativity and in some ways to think, ‘okay, things have been done a certain way to this point and maybe there are going to be new ways that we're thinking about how we do our work’.

EM: I am thinking so much about the best way to be messaging around why it makes sense to be addressing climate change risk and why it makes sense to address biodiversity risk from a legal perspective. Just sort of interested in your perspective in how impact investing can be effectively communicated to not only those within the financial space, but also more broadly in terms of the goals that it can achieve.

LB: I think that risk is one element of how we do that. I think that seeing a return on investment over time is important and often for sustainability and for climate and conservation impact, the returns aren't seen on the same timeline as a typical financial investment rate. So, I think it's thinking about what is the right solution that's going to match the period in which you're going to see the environmental return, the conservation return as well thinking about is the structure correct in terms of aligning those? Are your incentives aligned again, as I said before, in the structure? So, it's kind of making sure that all the pieces fit together in a way that's meaningful.

EM: We've talked a lot around energy transition over the course of the past two days and the fact that ultimately, we are moving toward a fossil-free economy; there's bumps in the road but that's where we're going. There's been less of a conversation around biodiversity and nature-related risks and I just love for those who might not be so familiar with what those kinds of risks look like. A bit of a 101 from you on nature-related risks and how your work helps to address them.

LB: So, we have actually seen an increase in focus or perhaps a shift in focus away from pure climate considerations towards, as you said, biodiversity and other environmental considerations. And I think in particular you might see this in a corporate environment where a company is looking at its supply chain and seeing that there are risks not just related to the big picture climate crisis, but also to biodiversity and to the real integrity of their supply chains. And so that could be agriculture-related, for example, where you could have huge issues in a big multinational company with a big multinational supply chain. And so, we've seen biodiversity be an increasing focus of what both investors are thinking about, what companies are thinking about, and that's a huge focus of what our work is and has been for a long time, but it's good to see that the market is starting to think about it as well. And now there's talk of things like biodiversity credits and other sort of mechanisms, but I think there's really an increasing attention on the need to somehow think about biodiversity and address the biodiversity crisis through more than just philanthropy, and through markets.