After the Canada Investment Summit, the opportunity now is to find credible ways to bring private capital into conservation
The Canada Investment Summit was built on the theme that “Canada has what the world wants”. As global capital mulls potential investments post-summit, it faces a nature market still in transition. Canada has ambition, a wealth of natural capital infrastructure and growing momentum with foreign investors. We need to build a foundation of trust to attract investors to our natural assets.
Canada is sitting on an enormous source of economic value. Our forests, wetlands, waterways and other natural assets are worth an estimated $3.6 trillion a year according to the federal government, yet much of that value remains outside traditional markets and investment decisions. The opportunity now is to find credible ways to bring private capital into conservation, so protecting nature becomes not only an environmental imperative, but an investable part of Canada’s economic future.
Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy charted an ambitious plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and meet our commitments under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Despite this investment, there is still a pronounced funding gap that public funds cannot cover. Private capital must come to the table — and private capital moves on evidence-based confidence, not hope and ambition.
Ask any institutional investor what they need before investing, and chances are you will hear three main themes.
First, they need a benchmarked return profile, similar to the predictable returns that can be generated by investing in ports, bridges and airports. Nature investments are nascent in the Canadian market and have not yet demonstrated predictability.
Second, they need liquidity. Canada's markets for carbon and biodiversity credits are thin. Mature exchanges built on a consistent trading volume are preconditions for institutional capital.
Third, investors need consistency. While the recently formed Taxonomy and Transition Planning Council is working on a made-in-Canada system for classifying green and transition investments, its work needs to broaden beyond climate mitigation to nature and biodiversity.
But above all, investors need numbers they can verify. That comes down to two things: reporting that is consistent and comparable, and reporting that can be audited.
Canada has already shown it can move quickly when it comes to reporting. Both the public and private sector now have a framework to report climate and sustainability information to investors, built on a global standard, thanks to the work of the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board and the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board. Voluntary guidance for providing nature disclosures is being developed internationally and should follow.
When it comes to actually recognizing nature on the balance sheet, governments are behind. In January 2026, the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board issued the first standard allowing governments to put certain conservation lands and forests on the balance sheet — resources that, until now, simply went unreported. Canada has no path to adopt this standard at the moment.
For now, the practical consequence remains that natural assets sit outside audited financial statements, so investor confidence will need to come from other financial information.
For a century, our capital markets have run on information reported in financial statements that is measured consistently, controlled rigorously and verified independently – and that same discipline is what nature reporting now needs regardless of where it sits. Three elements are essential to this: common performance measurement frameworks so results can be compared across projects; control frameworks over nature data held to the standard we apply to financial reporting; and independent verification of outcomes. Nature reporting today varies considerably from project to project and is rarely audited. That is a solvable problem, and we already have the solution.
Nation building with confidence
Canada’s nature strategy is built on the idea that conservation and economic value creation are not opposing outcomes. Vehicles such as nature outcome agreement areas — conserving a defined portion of a landscape while enabling development on the rest — allow investors to back conservation and earn a return on the same asset. Making that value visible is what turns it into an investable proposition.
Canada is standing on extraordinary natural wealth. Whether it becomes an asset base that can both be conserved and generate a return for investors into the foreseeable future depends on the maturity of the market we build for nature finance, and the trust and verifiability of financial reporting that let investors act with confidence. That is not just an environmental agenda or an accounting exercise. It is nation building — and the capital is already at the door.
Bailey Church is a partner of accounting advisory services at KPMG Canada. He leads the National Public Sector Accounting Advisory service line at KPMG, and the KPMG Global IPSASB network.
