Episode #17
Episode 17 - Professor Neil Entwistle, Head of Science at Rebalance Earth: We Already Know What to Do. Now Finance It.
Neil Entwistle spent years earning his stripes as one of the UK's most credible voices on river restoration, only to find out the science was never the hard part. He's now Head of Science at Rebalance Earth, spending most of his time trying to convince finance people to invest in restoring rivers. This isn't a story about a scientist crossing over into money. It's about what happens when you've spent your whole career knowing exactly what nature needs, but the obstacle in the way is that nobody has figured out how to sustainably fund it. Kirsty and Neil get into why straightened, dredged rivers are one of the reasons behind both floods and droughts, why bringing Sphagnum moss back into a peatland beats planting trees on it, and why sometimes the job is doing just 10% of the restoration while letting the landscape do the other 90%. They talk through the Alpine Glacier Project, which Neil and CEO Rob Gardner have followed since their student days under the late Professor David Collins. It consists of 52 years of hard data that turns climate change from theory into the study of a glacier that's literally disappearing before our eyes. And they lay out the commercial case behind the need to invest in river restoration, and what will happen if we don't. Flooded supply chains. Homes that can't get insured once Flood Re winds down in 2039. Customers who switch supermarkets once because their local is flooded, and never go back. They also talk about giving rivers their voice back, why "messy" is the best thing you can say about a landscape, and what it's like translating gravity and hydrology for people who only care about the financial return. As Neil puts it: "We already know what we need to do. The biggest question is how do we finance that."
