Nature Tech Unconference 2026: Opening Plenary
Introduction
Gilad Goren, Executive Director at the Nature Tech Collective opened the Nature Tech Unconference by welcoming attendees who had travelled from as far as Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil, and thanked LSE Generate and the Global School of Sustainability at LSE for co-hosting the event for the second year. He introduced Sian, events manager at LSE Generate, before handing over to two keynote speakers: Ben Goldsmith of Nattergal and Lucy Almond of the Nature4Climate.
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Key Takeaways
Gilad Goren
Noted over 400 applications for roughly 250 places, with sessions nominated and voted on by the community rather than set by Nature Tech Collective.
Explained the Unconference's format choice to avoid traditional panels, with only two keynote speakers across the two days.
Cited that around 70% of last year's attendees reported forming new partnerships as a result of the event.
Closed with thanks to the Nature Tech Collective team and LSE volunteers supporting the event.
Ben Goldsmith
Shared the story of rewilding his farm in South Somerset, including its role in his own experience of grief after the death of his daughter.
Described Nattergal, the natural capital company he founded to restore nature at landscape scale, and the process of removing fencing, drainage, and livestock to let land recover naturally.
Outlined three shifts he sees converging to enable nature restoration in the UK: a cultural shift toward reconnecting with nature, a financial shift driven by mechanisms like England's Environmental Land Management Scheme and natural flood management investment, and a technological shift enabled by tools like acoustic monitoring, AI species identification, and eDNA sampling.
Referenced Rebalance Earth's West Yorkshire Pension Fund-backed natural flood management work as an example of the financial shift in practice.
Framed the UK's history as the first industrialised nation to deplete its nature as an opportunity to now lead in demonstrating how to restore it.
Lucy Almond
Traced the origin of the term "nature tech" to a 2017 Nature Conservancy report, which included a half-page section naming three companies as an emerging investment opportunity.
Described early nature tech tools as largely built by NGOs, researchers, and practitioners solving practical field problems, rather than by tech-first founders.
Noted a historical gap in understanding between technologists and corporates or financial institutions engaging with nature tech, and described the "quiet enabling work" of convening and translation between these groups as an underappreciated part of the sector's development.
Argued that most current challenges in nature tech are market and translation problems rather than technical ones, since buyers need solutions that are defensible to their own boards and workable within existing systems.
Closed by suggesting the question for the two days is not which tools the sector needs next, but what relationships, norms, and shared infrastructure the ecosystem depends on.
