At Blue Earth Summit 2026, CISL joined investors, business leaders and entrepreneurs to explore how innovation, investment and collaboration can help build a more sustainable and resilient future, including what it will take to unlock more institutional capital for food and agriculture.
Dr Nina Seega, Director of the CISL Centre for Sustainable Finance, took part in the session, ‘Show Me the Money: What Would It Take for Pension Funds to Invest More in Food?’ alongside Matt Jolley, Director, Climate Tech and Sustainability, HSBC Innovation Banking and Raphaelle Guuinic, Operating Partner, Agrilife Studio.
The session explored the challenge of bringing more institutional capital into food and agriculture and how the market can create investable opportunities at the scale required by larger investors.
Connecting capital with opportunities to scale
A key theme was the gap between the scale at which institutional investors need to deploy capital and the size and maturity of many food and agricultural innovations seeking investment.
Closing that gap requires looking beyond individual ventures to the wider system connecting investors, innovators, farmers, businesses and places. Stronger pathways are needed to help promising solutions develop, demonstrate their value and ultimately reach a scale that can attract larger pools of capital.
This reflects a wider challenge across food and agriculture. Current market incentives can favour short-term efficiency and low-cost production over longer-term resilience, nutrition, nature recovery and food security, making it harder for innovative approaches to scale.
Place-based approaches can form part of the solution, connecting investment with the particular opportunities and needs of food systems and communities, including in the Global South. Accelerators and partnerships can also help innovators access the expertise, markets and capital needed to move from promising ideas towards commercial deployment.
Creating markets for innovation
The discussion also highlighted the importance of established businesses working alongside investors, entrepreneurs and farmers.
Large businesses can help create demand for new solutions through their supply chains, partnerships and investment, while corporate venture capital can support emerging food technologies through their earlier stages.
This matters because transforming the food system cannot depend on start-ups pushing change alone. Established businesses can help create the market conditions in which innovative solutions have a clearer pathway to commercial success and scale.
For entrepreneurs, meanwhile, resilience and access to the right partners remain critical, particularly in a sector where attracting capital can be difficult.
The challenge is therefore not simply finding more capital for food. It is about building the partnerships, investment pathways and market conditions that enable capital and innovation to translate into change at scale.
Transforming food, land and agriculture
Food and land systems are critical to food security, public health, economic resilience and nature. Innovation across agriculture, biotechnology, food production and digital technologies is creating new opportunities to build more productive, resilient and commercially competitive food systems.
CISL works with business, finance and policymakers to help reshape market conditions so that commercial value can be aligned with long-term food security, environmental recovery and societal wellbeing.