My guest today is Laura Segafredo – Chief Growth Officer at NatureAlpha, and a systems thinker who’s spent the last twenty years connecting science, policy, and capital to build tools that help finance face the realities of the climate crisis.

Laura began her career as an energy economist in Europe and California, contributing to major climate policy efforts like the Paris Agreement.

She then spent nearly a decade at BlackRock, where she helped transform ESG from a niche concern into a $500 billion force across fixed income and index investing. She led the creation of green bond tools, sustainability frameworks, and data standards that shaped the firm’s global strategy.

But as ESG became increasingly politicized, innovation stalled, and Laura decided it was time to chart a new path. She took a leap – from the world’s largest asset manager to NatureAlpha, a small startup using geospatial data to bring nature into investing.

There, she’s helping investors understand how companies depend on and impact natural systems – like water, soil, and biodiversity – and what happens when those systems start to break down. Most portfolios have never seen this data. Now they can.

NatureAlpha’s core product is Geoverse 2.0 – a geospatial AI tool that analyzes 8.5 million asset locations worldwide, tagging each with indicators of ecosystem health and how much a company depends on nature. It uses a quadrant model to flag the danger zone: places where companies are highly dependent on ecosystems – like rivers, forests, or soil – that are already deteriorating. That’s where risk concentrates – high dependency, low resilience.

The idea is to turn that risk into insight. Geoverse doesn’t just map individual assets – it scans entire portfolios, helping investors see exposures they’ve never seen before.

Through partnerships with data providers and platforms like ICE – and collaborations across the wider investment ecosystem – NatureAlpha is working to make its nature-related insights more accessible to investors within the tools they already use.

That unlocks what Laura calls the “double dividend”: portfolios that reduce nature-related risk and keep pace with market returns.

Still, Laura doesn’t overpromise. If there’s one lesson she’s carried from the ESG battles, it’s this: be transparent about what you know, and even more about what you don’t.

Today, she’s studying eco-theology, writing essays, and speaking to philosophers, post-growth economists, and faith leaders.

My conversation with Laura goes way beyond ESG.

It’s about what shifts when you zoom out from carbon and start seeing nature not as scenery, but as infrastructure. When rivers, forests, and soil stop being externalities and start showing up on the balance sheet.

If you tune in, you'll also hear what made her lose faith in market-based climate solutions, what the biggest lie the industry tells itself, and why the next big revolution in investing may be a moral one.

Because in the end, Laura’s not trying to build better ratings or cleaner tickers. She’s trying to build a better world – one that we might actually want to invest in.

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Additional Resources:
- Laura Segafredo LinkedIn

- NatureAlpha website

- Moral Revolution Podcast