Ecosystems as infrastructure: Tim Christophersen on how to rebuild humanity’s ties to nature

The forests of northern Europe provided Tim Christophersen with his first education. As a child in rural Germany he followed his grandfather, a forest ranger, on long walks among the trees. Fishing trips and mushroom hunts instilled habits of observation that would shape his later career. Today, after decades spent in international negotiations and corporate boardrooms, he still returns to nature daily, tending a regenerative farm outside Copenhagen. The rhythm of that farm, he says, reveals the “flywheel” of ecological balance: diversity begets resilience, resilience produces abundance. The contrast with industrial agriculture—built on simplification, fossil fuel inputs and fragile yields—is stark.

This dual perspective, part diplomat and part farmer, underpins Christophersen’s views on humanity’s entanglement with the natural world, explored in his book Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship Crisis with Mother Nature. There he argues that the crises of climate, biodiversity and pollution are not external threats but symptoms of a broken relationship with nature. Repairing that relationship, he insists, is not optional. Unlike a failing marriage, humanity cannot simply walk away. Without functioning ecosystems, civilization itself is imperilled.

Yet Christophersen’s analysis is not bleak. He stresses that nature is an ally as much as a victim. Forests, peatlands and mangroves can store carbon at vast scale, buffer coasts from storms, secure water supplies and rebuild soil. Even amid accelerating loss, restoration can succeed quickly once diversity is re-established. The evidence, he suggests, is there for anyone who cares to imagine landscapes not as they are—dry, degraded, denuded—but as they might be if given space to recover.

Imagination, for him, is central. He worries about “shifting baselines”: the gradual amnesia that blinds each generation to past abundance. Children today may take silent seas or treeless plains as normal. Overcoming this requires both science and storytelling, to remind societies that the present scarcity is neither natural nor inevitable. He invokes Hölderlin, the German poet, who wrote that “where there is danger, the saving powers also grow.” In Christophersen’s view, solutions are already sprouting—in new technologies, in shifting financial flows, and in the persistence of ecosystems themselves.

His years at the United Nations Environment Programme taught him the value of patient diplomacy, but also the limitations of policy without capital. He now works from the private sector, seeking to channel corporate resources toward restoration. At Salesforce, he champions initiatives from mangrove coalitions to AI-powered ecological tools. He argues that treating ecosystems as infrastructure—no less vital than roads or energy grids—could unlock both political will and investment. The sums required are vast, but the costs of neglect are larger still.

The Amazon’s looming dieback, coral reefs under siege, and thawing permafrost offer reminders of how little time remains before ecological tipping points cascade beyond control. Still, Christophersen insists that a “century of ecology” can follow this UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, provided societies learn to see economy and ecology not as rivals but as two expressions of the same root idea: the management of our common home.

In conversation, he returns often to the personal. Food, he says, is the daily expression of nature on our plates. Asking where it comes from, and what ecosystems sustained it, is the simplest starting point for reconnection. Nature, after all, is waiting.

An interview with Tim Christophersen

Mongabay: What first sparked your passion for nature and environmental restoration?

Tim Christophersen: I grew up in a small village surrounded by forests, and there was not much else to do than spending time in nature. My grandfather was a forest ranger who took me out for long walks, and I went mushroom hunting, fishing and camping from an early age. And while most kids both at that time and today have a very different childhood, usually within cities, I agree with E.O. Wilson’s ‘biophilia’ theory: humanity has lived from and with nature during basically all of our existence, and a deep understanding and love for nature is hardwired into our genes and brains. That passion for other life lives within each one of us, and it keeps bubbling up to the surface. We currently see a resurgence of that deep connection between humans and nature, and a new state of consciousness around the world is emerging. As nature is under existential threat, millions of young people and people of all ages realize this means that we are under threat, too.

Mongabay: After 25 years working to protect biodiversity and address climate change, what gives you the most hope?

Tim Christophersen: What gives me most hope is that nature is our staunchest ally! Nature is incredibly resilient, strong and patient. As we realize that we are part of nature, we will rise to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature loss and pollution. It is the only possible outcome for humanity, because the alternative is unthinkable. Runaway climate change, large-scale ecosystem collapse and lethal levels of pollution would mean the end of civilization as we know it, possibly for centuries to come. I am sure we are not ready to give in to that fear and anxiety. Instead, we can still choose a positive future, if we have the right narrative and vision. “Where there is danger, the saving powers also grow” is a saying attributed to 19th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. We are seeing a strong and fast growth of powerful solutions, both in technology and in our relationship with nature. The inertia of existing systems and power structures is strong, but the force of renewal, innovation and collaboration have always been stronger in the long term.

Mongabay: In your book, you mention “shifting baseline syndrome.” How can we overcome it?

Tim Christophersen: The cure for shifting baseline syndrome – the gradual amnesia of what natural abundance and diversity look like – is imagination! It can be triggered by storytelling based on the scientific evidence of the true wealth of nature. Imagine if we would see landscapes around us not as they are, but as they could be if they were fully restored. I don’t mean restored in the sense of going back to some romanticized past and static ecological state. I mean restored in terms of nature and humans living in a mutually beneficial and fully intentional, healthy, and productive relationship. That is within reach if we have basic ecological literacy, and the right imagination. Generative AI can help with creating that knowledge and imagination. Take for example the Mediterranean basin, now plagued by record drought, fire, and floods. A geological millisecond ago, countries like Spain, Italy and Greece and also Morocco, Tunisia or Egypt were mostly covered in towering forests, providing for a cool, moist climate, fertile soil, and abundant nature on which all ancient civilizations in the area built their prosperity and naval power. All of that natural wealth has disappeared. We live in a ‘ten percent world’, as I describe in the book. And at the same time, we are the first generation that has the scientific knowledge, and the technological and financial means to restore entire biomes to that previously unimaginable levels of productivity and abundance. An exciting opportunity! But we first need the imagination to get started. We need to understand our role on this planet as stewards of nature. We are Earth’s most powerful ecosystem engineer, and we can use that power for good.

Mongabay: You’ve worked at high-level political negotiations and in the corporate sector—where do you see the greatest potential for transformative action on the environment?

Tim Christophersen: I have tried to distill 25 years of experience on climate and nature policy and projects around the world into my book. In my view, the greatest untapped potential for more decisive action is in more effective collaboration between the public and private sector, which can spark a virtuous cycle of creating more political will and more resources. One key step would be to lift the discussion about ecosystem restoration to the same level of discussion we have about other essential infrastructure. Germany, for example, has just committed several hundred billion Euros for improving the country’s infrastructure. Having sufficient clean water, sufficient nutritious food, and a stable climate are essential infrastructure for any country’s future, including for its defenses. However, we don’t see nature in that way yet, and still take her for granted. This might change with recent rulings from the International Court of Justice, requiring countries to address climate change, and with changes in how countries measure national wealth, which now includes the state of natural capital. We are on a better track than we think, and we need the public sector to provide more courageous, clearer policy and market signals, and the private sector to be more bold and open to new public-private partnerships.

Mongabay: Why is ecosystem restoration critical for addressing climate change?

Tim Christophersen: Mongabay: When I worked for the UN Environment Programme, our team issued a report on the potential of nature-based solutions for climate mitigation. We found that nature can solve about one third of the climate crisis in terms of putting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into biomass, soils, and the depth of the ocean. However, that is only part of the story. The other part of climate action from ecosystem restoration is in resilience and adaptation to climate change. We are now in the process of overshooting the 1.5 degree Celsius global warming target of the Paris Agreement. Climate change is upon us. Nature can help us to adapt by securing water, food, and buffer us from extreme weather events. Mangrove forests, for example, are an effective coastal protection against storm surges. They have disappeared from much of their original range, but we can bring them back. Every ecosystem and biome, from peatlands to wetlands, grasslands, forests and the ocean, holds multiple benefits, beyond addressing climate change, for humanity and for all other species if we would restore them at scale.

Mongabay: What have you learned from your own regenerative farm in Denmark about restoring nature at a local level?

Tim Christophersen: One chapter in the book is about our own farming adventure that started 5 years ago when we bought an old dairy farm, which we are now converting to an agro-forestry permaculture. We are learning new things every day about the life around us that we share the farm with. The biggest learning is that nature works like a flywheel: with critical mass and momentum, it becomes self-stabilizing. Once there is sufficient diversity, nature runs beautifully and in a self-correcting way, producing abundance including a surplus that can be harvested. All we need is diversity, and nature will provide abundance, over time. Industrial farming pushes for the exact opposite. Instead of diversity, we have pushed for simplification. The abundance we seem to see in industrial farming is based on a trick to pump external energy in the form of industrial fertilizers, fossil fuels, and pesticides into the few remaining plant and animal species on factory farms. The model is now coming to a dead end, because the flywheel of nature has almost stopped on those farms. And once it stops, no amount of industrial input can replace soil biodiversity, or the natural equilibrium of nutrients, or the natural carbon and water cycle. What we still need to learn is how to monetize our regenerative form of farming in a way that allows for sufficient income. Some regenerative farms have solved this issue, but it takes time, and initial investment, with higher productivity in the long term. Fortunately, agricultural subsidies are starting to shift towards regenerative agriculture in the EU, though the process is still too slow.

Mongabay: Can you share a favorite success story from your time at UNEP or Salesforce where environmental action clearly made a difference?

Tim Christophersen: There are many! One of my favorites is the establishment of the Climate Finance Unit in my Team in UNEP’s Ecosystem Division in 2017. At the time, investing in nature conservation and restoration at commercial scale was a rare occasion. The multilateral development banks, including the World Bank Group, were not investing sufficiently in nature, and private finance was not flowing, because it was an unknown asset class with unknown risks. Since 2017, UNEP and the UNEP Finance Initiative have systematically built the foundations for nature as an asset class, together with many others. And we now see the results. UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature annual report, which my team started in 2021, shows that just in the past few years, since 2020, private investments in nature have gone up eleven-fold, to over $100 billion per year. This is still only ten percent of the estimated need to invest in nature, but it is a good start. Another great success story from my time at Salesforce is the Global Mangrove Breakthrough. It started as a small idea to form a coalition in support of the world’s mangroves, and now has well over 100 governments, companies, and all the major NGOs working closely together to achieve a collective finance goal of $4 billion toward the restoration and conservation of 15 million hectares of mangroves. We are proud to be the initial funder of the Breakthrough initiative, and of 12 mangrove projects around the world.

Mongabay: What role do you think large technology companies should play in global sustainability?

Tim Christophersen: I like working for Salesforce because the company puts its money where its mouth is. In addition to having a $100 million grant fund for nature and sustainability, and being a global leader on decarbonization, we invest significantly in carbon credits from nature-based solutions such as agro-forestry, or mangrove restoration. And our team has a goal to conserve and restore 100 million trees by 2030. I describe in the book some of the main lessons we have learned. As a tech company, we can of course also bring our ‘superpower’ of our technology into the equation for a nature positive world. Through a program called the Agents for Impact Accelerator, we have helped NGOs like the Forest Stewardship Council, Rare, and the Ocean and Risk Resilience Action Alliance to tap into the power of AI to improve and scale their programs. I hope we will see more of the essential capacity building for the nature movement, as we need to ensure this powerful new technology is a force for good.

Mongabay: What practical steps can ordinary individuals take to contribute to the restoration of our planet?

Tim Christophersen: The main change is first and foremost a change in how we see the world. As agricultural pioneer Don Campbell once put it “‘If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things.” We are now at a time in history and in climate change where making small changes is no longer enough, so we have to change the way we see nature, and our role in it. So the practical step for everyone is simply to learn more about nature, to be curious, and spend time in nature. To listen and observe, until we understand that we are part of nature, and we live from nature everywhere, all of the time. Once everyone builds a deeper relationship with nature, changes in our actions will come naturally, like eating a more plant-rich, local and seasonal diet, and learning more about ecology. Nature’s rights will be recognized more formally in our laws, instead of seeing all other species as a commodity. And we will more openly acknowledge that other species are closely related to us, and we to them. These changes in our behavior will come on gradually, once we have made the fundamental shift of how we see the role of ourselves on Planet Earth: we are the guardians and gardeners of creation. We are Earth’s most powerful ecosystem engineer. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 marks the beginning of this necessary mindshift. It is an idea whose time has come. As Jane Goodall writes in her foreword, “Let us enter into a new era of moral and spiritual evolution”.

Mongabay: What do you mean when you describe our current situation as a “relationship crisis with nature”?

Tim Christophersen: The signs of that relationship crisis are all around us. Our global climate, after ten thousand years of relative stability, is spiraling out of control. Ecosystems are imploding. We are now in the sixth planetary mass extinction event – the first one caused by a single species: us. Since the 1970s alone, we have lost about 70 percent of all wildlife populations, according to WWF’s Living Planet Index. If this was a human relationship, I would say we are headed for divorce. But unlike in a human relationship, we cannot divorce from nature, because we cannot live without nature. We have no choice but to repair the relationship, because we otherwise undermine our own well-being and ultimately our survival. What we tend to underestimate in the relationship with nature are the power structures. We believe we are stronger than nature, because we can turn a forest into a parking lot, and cultivate and even genetically modify species. However, nature is infinitely more resourceful, resilient, and patient than we are. So rather than a marriage, our relationship with nature is perhaps more like that of a rebellious child who believes they have it all figured out. In fact, we don’t even play in the same league yet at nature’s ingenuity. And the sooner we recognize how much we still need to learn, the better. Recent advances in ecology are mind-blowing, and show that nature is so much more sophisticated than we ever imagined. It is becoming clear that collaboration and synergies are more important organizing principles of nature than competition, and we need to learn from that. Competition is often mistaken as the inherent main organizing principle of human society, when in fact it should be collaboration. In the book, I trace the philosophical origins behind some of the underlying principles that are at the heart of some of our current challenges. It is fascinating to me that much of the world seems to be on a philosophical autopilot programmed about 300 years ago during the so-called era of ‘Enlightenment’.

Mongabay: You advocate that restoring nature is economically beneficial—why then do you think we are still slow to invest in it?

Tim Christophersen: Financial institutions like banks and pension funds are not yet investing significantly in nature and ecosystem services because it has not been a well-defined asset class, like real estate or technology, for example. That has made it difficult to correctly price risks and invest at large scale. This situation is now improving due to initiatives like the Responsible Banking Initiative and the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, which are helping to establish nature as an investable asset class. The other change we still need is to better recognize ecosystem services, such as clean water, and link their maintenance with the consumers of nature’s goods and services.

And finally, we have to stop spending taxpayer money on destroying nature, through harmful subsidies for industrial pesticides and fertilizers, for example. In the case study from Andhra Pradesh in the book, the state government is saving about $1 billion per year in fertilizer subsidies because they have restored soil biodiversity as the main driver of agricultural productivity. The return of their investment comes in the form of more public goods, and monetizing these for private investors has been difficult to date. Fortunately, there are huge strides in technology, including artificial intelligence and in financial technology, to enable the development of high quality nature conservation and restoration projects at large scale, and related significant investments.

Mongabay: What do you hope will be the lasting impact of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030)?

Tim Christophersen: Ten years are not sufficient to ‘halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide’ which is the sweeping goal of the UN Decade. The Decade can trigger awareness and the basic ecological literacy, which I also write about in my book, to lead into a new relationship between humans and nature. I suggest we need a century of ecology to repair our relationship with nature, and the basic life support systems of our common home. Ecology and economy have the same roots in ancient Greek, one is the knowledge of our common home, and the other the management of it. We cannot run a global economy without the fundamental knowledge of ecology. The UN Decade can usher in this century of ecology, and the ecological literacy we need to rediscover a mutually beneficial relationship with nature. And it is already happening. China even made the ‘ecological civilization’ the main focus of their Presidency of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Decision makers are waking up to the fact that we have basically been flying the global economy blind, without ecological knowledge. The good news is that everybody can contribute to our global ecological literacy by getting closer to nature.

Mongabay: Which global biodiversity hotspot or ecosystem gives you the greatest concern today, and why?

Tim Christophersen: Scientists have identified several planetary-scale ecological tipping points in the climate system, which could shift Earth irreversibly and rather quickly into a different ecological state if they are triggered. They include Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheet meltdown, the widespread dieback of coral reefs, and the thawing of permafrost. The one that worries me the most is the potential of the Amazon basin flipping from a moist tropical rainforest to a savannah woodland, with more frequent droughts and fires. Because it is a tipping point we are fairly close to, and it would not only destroy a lot of unique biodiversity, but also endanger most of South America’s agriculture, and could cause a cascading effect to trigger other tipping points. Fortunately, the current government in Brazil has slowed deforestation rates in the Amazon, as have other countries that share the Amazon basin, and projects like the Arc of Restoration are aiming to bring back millions of hectares of degraded rainforest across the Amazon. The danger of this tipping point for our global civilization is one of the reasons we need the UN Climate Summit in November, COP30, to be a success. It will contribute to turning the tide on ecosystem degradation, and we should all support the government of Brazil in their efforts to have a strong outcome of the Summit.

Mongabay: If people could do just one thing to start reconnecting with nature, what would you recommend?

Tim Christophersen: Think about what you eat and drink. Your food is your daily dose of nature. Which farms produced it? How do they contribute to restoring nature, or are they rather degrading nature? Where does your water come from? Find out which ecosystems filter and store your drinking water, and how you can better connect with them and protect and restore those ecosystems. Make nature tangible for you. Make your connection with nature count, and build a personal relationship with nature. Nature will answer your queries and your curiosity! We are all part of nature, and that is why we will collectively rise to the challenge to defend and restore nature. Nature is waiting. It is time to come home.

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Rhett Butler Editor

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