16 October, 2026

It seemed appropriate to be attending an event called Blue Earth Summit by the River Thames during Flood Action Week.

And even more fitting to hear Claudine Blamey of Aviva announce, on behalf of the FloodAction Coalition, two ambitious programmes designed to turn talk of flood resilience into action.

The Coalition, led by our friends at The Conduit, has set itself the goal of creating a £1 billion market for nature-based water resilience by 2028, bringing together insurers, investors, landowners and others to make nature-based solutions investable at scale.

Its new regional demonstrators in Cambridgeshire and Greater Manchester are each expected to be worth around £100 million. The interesting bit is the model behind them. Nature is treated as critical infrastructure, with a water company anchoring each programme and other organisations exposed to water risk, from rail and roads to energy, developers and insurers, investing alongside it. In simple terms: if you benefit from a more resilient landscape, you help pay for it.

The ambition is not simply to deliver two successful projects, but to develop an approach that can be repeated elsewhere in the UK.

And that felt like a pretty good manifestation of many of the themes running through Blue Earth: collaborate differently; make the commercial argument; move from pilots to scale; experiment; and stop assuming sustainability has to mean compromise.

Blue Earth once again brought together an eclectic mix of business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, sustainability specialists, scientists, campaigners and creatives. But perhaps the most encouraging thing was the sense of possibility, whether it was about telling better stories, finding new business models, unexpected partnerships, or just a willingness to try things.

Amid all the reasons to worry about the future, it was a useful reminder that there are also plenty of people busy trying to build a better one.

By David Lourie