From Commitment to Delivery: Why Nature Programmes Stall and How to Operationalise Them
Session Description
Verna opened by naming the gap that sits at the centre of most nature commitments today: organisations across mining, housebuilding, infrastructure and utilities are making ambitious pledges, but Habitat Management and Monitoring Plans still live as static PDFs, biodiversity data is scattered across consultants, spreadsheets and shared drives, and site managers often have no clear view of what's actually been promised for the ground they're standing on. Directors, in turn, can't see how any of it adds up at a portfolio level.
Rather than present this as an abstract problem, the session built it around a single fictional site manager, Alex, responsible for a 500-hectare former sand quarry called Birch Quarry. Attendees were asked to think as Alex would: after a few minutes of quiet individual reflection, they paired up to name the two biggest challenges at each stage of a nature project, then moved into groups of six to negotiate down to four challenges worth escalating to "Alex's boss." Each group wrote its answers on sticky notes and placed them under four physical headers around the room, plan, implement, monitor, report, which let Verna read out live patterns forming across the whole room.
One pattern stood out immediately: most groups had far more to say about planning and implementation than about monitoring and reporting, which tracks with where Verna sees most real-world nature programmes actually sitting right now, still early, still building toward delivery.
The session closed with a forced-choice exercise. If Alex's boss would only fund one of the four stages, planning, implementing, monitoring or reporting, which should it be? The room's answer was close to unanimous: none of them in isolation. Planning without execution is just a plan on paper, and execution without monitoring means nobody can tell whether it's actually working.
Speakers
Rafi Cohen, Co-CEO, Verna
Jake Rich, Senior Associate, Verna
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Different stakeholders often want different outcomes on different timescales, and unresolved tension here (for example, between a project's commercial targets and a local community's priorities) can stall delivery before implementation even starts.
Action tracking on the ground is routinely scattered across spreadsheets, documents and messaging apps, with no shared source of truth, especially where multiple delivery partners are working to different standards.
Monitoring data frequently reaches decision-makers too late to act on. The room's example was invasive species growth affecting solar panel output, where a delay of even a few months turns a profitable project loss-making.
Every audience for a nature programme, communities, investors, regulators, corporate boards, needs a different framing of the same evidence, and most delivery teams don't have the time or in-house skill to do this well, which limits their ability to make the case for further investment.
Five root causes came up repeatedly: data availability and quality, the difficulty of turning raw ecological data into decision-ready analysis, the sheer time horizon of nature projects (often decades), the number and range of stakeholders involved, and securing long-term finance for programmes that are capital-intensive up front.
When asked to prioritise funding toward a single stage of a nature programme, the group consensus was that doing so sets delivery up for failure. Planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting are interdependent, not trade-offs to choose between.
