Blue Earth Summit 2026: thinking slowly, acting quickly on nature, water and skills

By Anna Swaithes, Chief Sustainability Officer 

At Blue Earth Summit 2026, we brought partners together to explore how to build resilient places for people, nature and the nation. Here are my reflections on what we heard, and what it means for how we act. 

One of the things I’m trying to learn in this period of accelerating change is how to think more slowly while acting more quickly. That doesn’t mean simply doing more, faster. It’s about taking the time to identify where we can make the greatest contribution to our strategy, being clear about our role, and then moving at pace where there’s a real opportunity for impact at scale. 

With climate and nature pressures intensifying alongside AI-driven change, we need space to question, listen and think deeply, while making sure complexity doesn’t become a reason for inaction. 

Blue Earth Summit provides that space. It lets us step back, challenge our thinking and hear from people approaching these problems from very different perspectives. 

Now in its sixth year, Blue Earth Summit brought more than 5,000 founders, investors, policymakers, scientists and business leaders to Woolwich Works in London from 14 to 16 October 2026. In our third year as headline partner, our theme was shaping resilient places that deliver for people, nature and the nation. 

There’s an increasingly strong case that resilience, and the natural systems it depends on, is a precondition for sustainable growth, not an environmental add-on. The challenge now is turning that understanding into action at the pace and scale needed. That challenge ran through our conversations at the summit, from making the case for nature and mobilising investment to water resilience and the skills needed for a changing economy. 

Making the case for nature beyond the sustainability community 

In a fireside conversation with Marian Spain, former Chief Executive of Natural England, and Paul van Zyl, Co-founder and CEO of The Conduit, we discussed how to cut through the noise and keep making the case for nature as a foundation for resilience. 

Evidence matters, but so do storytelling, leadership and broader, braver coalitions. If we want nature to become integral to decision-making, we need to build a case that resonates well beyond the sustainability community. 

How can we unlock investment in nature-based solutions? 

Our investment workshop asked how to mobilise the capital needed to turn ambition into delivery. Around 30 organisations – from the British Business Bank and NatWest Group to Defra and Wessex Water – worked on four live projects that are needed but hard to fund, including our own saltmarsh proposition. 

At Lymington Harbour, where we own most of the foreshore and seabed, the saltmarsh is eroding by two to three metres a year. We’re funding sediment recharge trials there, led by Lymington Harbour Commissioners and Land & Water. The challenge is how we take learning from projects like this and create the conditions to scale nationally. 

Across all four projects, we saw similar barriers: 

• no clear incentive for anyone to invest first 

• difficulty putting a value on reduced risk 

• early-stage funding arriving too late. 

Potential solutions include identifying who already bears the cost of inaction, bundling smaller schemes to make them more investable, and developing common standards that give investors greater confidence. 

You can learn more about the insights from this session in our two-page report. 

Water resilience: fixing the ‘systems plumbing’ 

The same challenge emerged in our main-stage discussion on water. Good ideas aren’t the problem. The difficulty is creating the governance, evidence and funding mechanisms that allow them to scale. In other words, we need to fix the ‘systems plumbing’. 

I joined Claudine Blamey, Chief Sustainability Officer at Aviva; Harry Bowell, Director of Land and Nature at the National Trust; and Sam Westwood, who leads partnership delivery of nature-based solutions at Anglian Water. Moderated by Will Lockhart OBE, Deputy Director for Nature Markets and Investment at Defra, our discussion explored why promising catchment approaches and nature-based solutions remain difficult to scale. 

FloodAction Coalition is seeking to address some of those barriers. During the session, Claudine, as Chair of FloodAction, launched two UK-first regional water resilience demonstrators in Cambridgeshire and Greater Manchester. 

Each programme, worth around £100m, brings a water company together with energy, road and rail operators, developers and insurers to invest in nature-based solutions – such as new wetlands or healthier soils – delivered by farmers, landowners and local nature groups. 

Sharing the cost in this way tackles one of the fundamental barriers we heard in the investment workshop: when many benefit, no single organisation necessarily has a clear incentive to pay first. 

“We need to move from reacting to risk to investing in resilience.” – Claudine Blamey, Chair, FloodAction Coalition 

As a founding member, we’ve helped shape FloodAction as it’s grown to more than 80 members. Our involvement is also helping us understand how we can strengthen water resilience across our own portfolio, which is increasingly important to protecting and growing our business. 

Building green skills for a changing economy 

Another priority is making sure people have the skills to thrive through the changes ahead. Our skills workshop explored the collision between AI-driven disruption to entry-level jobs and growing skills needs in sectors such as construction, renewables and nature restoration. 

Over the past year, we’ve worked with 103 Ventures and partners spanning employers, unions and combined authorities to understand what’s holding back the UK skills system and what role we can play. 

The scale of the transition is significant: 

• 97% of UK organisations report an AI skills gap 

• graduate roles are down 45% year on year 

• around four million workers will need retraining by 2035 to close the green skills gap. 

But there’s also a big opportunity. The workshop’s recommendations include starting at home with responsible AI adoption, and turning the risk of AI job losses into a chance to build green skills across the economy. With AI, devolution and skills reform all shifting at once, there’s a rare window to act. 

Turning the mirror on ourselves 

Across these conversations, I kept returning to one thought: collaboration in principle isn’t enough. It’s easy to point to what government, markets or others need to do differently. It’s much harder to turn the mirror on ourselves. 

Are our decisions and investments aligned with the outcomes we say we want? Are we building the capabilities we need? Are we prepared to change how we work rather than wait for others to move first? And where could we use our influence, investment or convening power more boldly? These are important questions for us to answer. 

From reflection to action 

Our long-term stewardship across land, sea and cities gives us both the opportunity and the responsibility to connect evidence, people, partners and investment, and to move from ambition to delivery. 

The momentum is there: all of our sessions at Blue Earth Summit related to projects where we’re already building insight, testing ideas and working with others. But the discussions also made clear that we can go further. So we’re resolved to define our role on each initiative and act on it, not wait for others to move first. 

That role will differ depending on the opportunity. We might be a landowner, investor, developer, convener or catalyst – or a combination of these. At Lymington Harbour, for example, we’re both landowner and funder of sediment recharge trials. Through FloodAction Coalition, we’re helping to bring partners together as a founding member. 

Defining the right role from the outset helps us decide where to focus, bring the right partners alongside us and, where the opportunity is right, move with greater confidence and pace. 

Thank you to everyone who challenged our thinking, shared their experience and helped move these conversations forward, and to Blue Earth Summit for creating space for practical and optimistic discussion. 

Listen to the podcast 

Recorded at the summit, our podcast brings together Dave Caygill, Co-Director of FloodAction Coalition, Harry Bowell of the National Trust and me to continue the conversation from our water resilience panel and explore what it will take to turn promising ideas into delivery at scale.