From A Force of Nature to NATCAP-HUB

The keynote will establish the policy and intellectual foundation for the day.

Canada’s strategy recognizes that nature supports economic prosperity, jobs, food security, resilience, and long-term competitiveness. It also identifies a need to accelerate action across governments, businesses, Indigenous Peoples, and other partners.

The keynote will position NATCAP-HUB as a potential research and decision infrastructure connecting the three federal pillars rather than as a collection of separate research studies.

Particular attention will be paid to Pillar 3. The strategy states that public funding alone cannot close the nature-finance gap and calls for public and private capital, innovative financing models, improved natural-capital accounting, and better integration of nature’s value into decision-making.

This panel provides the empirical foundation of the NATCAP-HUB Partnership Grant.

Canada aims to protect 30% of its lands and waters by 2030 and proposes a combination of protected areas, Project Finance for Permanence initiatives, Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures, Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, and other partnership-based approaches.

But achievement of numerical targets alone does not answer the critical research question: are organizations, investments, and conservation interventions producing measurable improvements in biodiversity and ecosystem condition?

The panel will examine the data infrastructure required to connect corporate and facility activity with biodiversity outcomes, including facility locations, protected and conserved areas, Key Biodiversity Areas, ecosystem condition, pollution, land use, and other geospatial information.

The working lunch will turn the policy and research discussions into an integrated SSHRC Partnership Grant architecture.

Participants will work in interdisciplinary groups around: Research Question → Data → Method → Partner → Pilot → HQP → Output → Impact. Each table will explicitly connect its work to one or more pillars of A Force of Nature.

Particular attention will be given to the federal strategy’s emphasis on partnerships and to the SSHRC Partnership Grant requirements for co-creation, interdisciplinary integration, partner engagement, HQP development, knowledge mobilization, and long-term impact.

Working-lunch outputs

• Refined NATCAP-HUB theory of change
• Research-theme interdependencies
• Partner responsibility matrix
• Priority Canadian pilots
• HQP training opportunities
• Knowledge-mobilization opportunities
• Missing expertise and potential new partners
• Specific revisions required for the SSHRC Stage 1 application

Indigenous leadership should be treated as a cross-cutting foundation of NATCAP-HUB, rather than simply as one research variable.

The federal strategy states explicitly that there is “no path to 30x30 without Indigenous leadership” and emphasizes Indigenous-led stewardship, Indigenous Guardians Programs, Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, and Project Finance for Permanence initiatives.

This session therefore examines how NATCAP-HUB can integrate Indigenous knowledge, plural values, stewardship, governance, and data sovereignty into the design of the Partnership Grant.

The federal strategy provides concrete PFP examples, including the Northwest Territories’ Our Land for the Future, which combines Indigenous leadership, government participation, philanthropy, conservation, and long-term financing.

This panel directly connects NATCAP-HUB to Pillar 2, Building Canada Well.

The federal strategy proposes integrating Canada’s nature and economic agendas and specifically identifies mapping, data and artificial intelligence as tools for biodiversity identification, carbon accounting, project planning, permitting, and improved investment decisions. This creates a particularly strong policy connection with the NATCAP-HUB Partnership Grant’s proposed research on AI-enabled natural-capital valuation and decision support.

The session will examine how ecological evidence moves through: Mapping → Measurement → Valuation → Natural Capital Accounting → Corporate Disclosure → Assurance → Decision.

The discussion will consider frameworks including SEEA-EA, the Natural Capital Protocol, TNFD, GRI 101 and ESRS E4.

The federal strategy also proposes additional mapping of landscapes, including coastlines, peatlands and permafrost, to generate biodiversity and carbon-sequestration data that can support project investment decisions.

This session places Pillar 3, Valuing Nature and Mobilizing Capital, at the centre of the NATCAP-HUB Partnership Grant.

The strategy states that Canada’s natural assets underpin economic prosperity but that current investment is insufficient. It notes a global biodiversity-finance gap exceeding US$1 trillion annually and observes that more than 80% of existing biodiversity funding comes from public sources. The strategy concludes that public funds alone will not suffice.

How can credible measurement and valuation of natural capital change organizational decisions and mobilize capital toward nature-positive outcomes?

The Taskforce mandate described in the strategy directly overlaps with NATCAP-HUB’s research agenda: improving how nature is accounted for, integrating nature’s value into decisions, attracting private capital to conservation, and encouraging public-private partnerships.

The closing session will move beyond a summary of the day’s discussion. Its purpose is to determine what the Professional Development Day changes in the Partnership Grant.

The synthesis will identify the strongest research questions emerging from the day, methodological changes required in the PG, key Canadian datasets, priority pilots, partner responsibilities, Indigenous governance requirements, AI and data-governance requirements, HQP opportunities, policy and practice pathways, potential contribution to the Expert Taskforce, and named leads and deadlines for the next 90 days.

1. Canada’s Nature Priorities
2. NATCAP-HUB Research Questions
3. Measurement and Data
4. Valuation
5. Natural Capital Accounting
6. Corporate and Public-Sector Decision-Making
7. Investment and Finance
8. Measurable Nature Outcomes

The reception will provide space for academic researchers, Indigenous partners, businesses, professional bodies, conservation organizations, government representatives, financial institutions and other partners to develop collaborations arising from the day’s discussions.

The goal is to move from conversation to partnership commitments, pilot opportunities and concrete contributions to the SSHRC PG resubmission.