Tim Male: Podcast Q&A

David recently travelled to Denver, Colorado, for the 2023 Global Environmental Markets and Finance Summit. There, he was joined by Tim Male, Founder and Executive Director of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center based in the US state of Maryland. 

Tim founded the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in 2017. Prior to launching this startup, he served as an Associate Director at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Vice President for Conservation Policy at Defenders of Wildlife, Director at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and Co-Director of agriculture policy at Environmental Defense Fund. 

Tim is also part of The Biodiversity Credit Alliance (BCA) to establish crediting ‌that supports global ecological restoration efforts, provides trusted value to participating businesses, and offers metrics that scale. 

He holds degrees in science from Yale University and the University of Hawaii. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Science magazine and a range of peer-reviewed journals. 

What does the Environmental Policy Innovation Center do? 

We are a nonprofit organisation that focuses our advocacy around how we make environmental progress happen faster. Our team of 25 staff are lawyers, PhD scientists, MBAs, and business leaders. With their combined expertise, we try to find policies that will lead to faster progress and replicate them. 

We heavily consider things like biodiversity net gain (BNG), and the structures built within it, because those kinds of policies set up right give enormous incentives for people to move faster. 

What was your role at the White House? 

My role was looking at how we expand private finance into nature, initiatives around wildlife conservation, drought, wildfire and flooding. On any day, it could have been 10 different issues, but I’d often be working on offset policies and private investment and how the two can combine. 

What do you think of the BNG policy in the UK?

It is innovative, especially in that law will soon mandate it. In the United States, we've had no net loss for decades, and it was a presidential statement that put us there. 

What role is America playing in the biodiversity space?

In America, there are two markets that are important: one for habitat, particularly aquatic habitat, wetlands and streams, and another one for endangered wildlife. And those two markets have had very different fates because of policy choices. 

I have spent a lot of time looking at the rapid expansion of the stream and wetland market. It is now on a multibillion dollar annual market for US regulated offsets that works very well, and the key feature of that is that we put the risks on the provider of the offset, so they cannot sell offsetting services until they have documented success. 

We focus the programmes on restoration, and there's a very obvious documented change in the habitat's condition. They take places that used to be wet that were drained and make them wet again and full of birds. The endangered species or the wildlife policy we have has struggled however, as it is riskier and therefore, not preferred by private sector investors. 

Do you think businesses in the US will soon be required to invest in natural capital to secure investment?

It's already happening here, completely driven by the UK and Europe, which is fantastic. Our businesses are certainly paying attention because they seek European investment, and in order to meet the requirements they need to follow suit. 

There is a pure environmental regulatory market and there is a purely voluntary market. Between those, is a finance disclosure related market, which doesn't feel voluntary. 

Corporations left to their own devices would not be making these choices. I think the key thing that could lead to moderately priced credits is to satisfy that demand and probably what are higher quality and more costly credits for the deregulated market. What is critical for the finance space is that there is an available biodiversity credit supply where people need it, where businesses need it and where their supply chain and their customers operate and live.

Tell us about getting the Biodiversity Credit Alliance (BCA) going. 

It took a long time in the carbon markets for international bodies to arise that don't have a vested stake in the sale of the credits themselves. The BCA is an effort with support from the UN Development Programme and many others around the world to figure out some consistent principles that should be available under protocols to restore biodiversity, but also some systems to decide how and when and whether you can use those credits to satisfy a corporate or other need. 

The structure is a wonderful idea to create. It's a bit of a herding cats process, across so many interests in countries but the alliance, the papers and the principles with definitions need to be agreed, so that buyers know that there are levels of quality that they can identify and choose and seek, realistically. 

What do you think we could do differently in the UK and the US?

One of the key problems as a nonprofit is connecting people like yourself and others in America, where there just is no dialogue. 

For example, with Biodiversity Net Gain, almost no one in the United States understands you're doing that, and you have these really clever design features that no one is aware of. 

For example, your statutory credits are available from the government, just as they are in the US, but you've discouraged people from getting their credits from the government because they’re so expensive. Therefore, if there are businesses like Environment Bank available, businesses have that option.

This is brilliant, because what we see in the United States is whenever the government takes over that role, they consistently underprice. Once you set a super low price, it both destroys private enterprise and means you can’t actually help nature. So there are things that we just haven't thought of in the United States that you all have design tools to address, and if we worked together, we’d get much better results. 

What were the couple of key take home messages from the Global Environmental Markets and Finance Summit for you?

There are so many. One is just the number of people who said to me, we have so much money, and we don't know what to do with it. Everyone wants to help nature and they cannot find enough options, so there is definitely a market for nature restoration across the world. 

Another takeaway would be this tension that is playing out all over the place. Do we measure nature directly, always with lots of biological indicators that scientists collect or do we use surrogates that if they see progress, this is likely to lead to progress for nature too? 

I think the Defra 4.0 metric is great, but it is important that we have a view that every so often, every few years, you'll get an iteration and that doesn't mean that what you're measuring now is wrong - it just means that there'll be improvements. 

Finally, organisations like Environment Bank or nature banks, there's a great chance that no matter what the law or metric says, people are going to be doing things because they care. It is important to remember about the human incentive to steward and care for and improve things, and I think that's a big part of what you'll see in your Habitat Bank sites in the long term.