Aerial view of La Montaña Roja volcano or The Red Mountain Special Nature Reserve with the beaches Playa de La Tejita on the right of it while Playa de Montana Roja and Playa Sur on the left of the mountain with the town of El Medano of the left side of it on Tenerife island, Canary Islands in Spain on May 19, 2019. The coast as seen from an airplane after take off as the airport is nearby. The beaches are famous and a popular tourist attraction, there is also nudist beach next to Playa Tejita and the location is popular for surfing, kite surf and wind surf as the ocean provides strong winds and waves. (Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
As COP30 begins in Brazil, negotiators will focus on familiar pillars of climate action: new and revised NDCs 3.0, financing resilience and nature, food-systems transformation and enabling a just transition. But beneath these discussions lies a deeper economic risk: the world’s most important natural infrastructure, the soil that stabilises food systems and the seabed ecosystems that support marine food supplies and regulate the ocean’s carbon cycle, is starting to fail.
For decades, these domains have been separated into land versus ocean, agriculture versus fisheries, green versus blue economy. But they function as parallel infrastructures: each stores carbon, regulates water and nutrients, buffers volatility and sustains the food systems that feed the world.
Their decline is no longer a climate or environmental concern. It is a macroeconomic and national-security risk that cuts across supply chains, food prices, sovereign stability and fiscal exposure. As these living buffers weaken, the shocks they once absorbed are resurfacing in yields, fisheries productivity, commodity volatility, insurance losses and public-finance stress. If COP30 is to define the next era of global climate action, protecting the natural infrastructure that supports markets, on land and at sea, must be treated as core economic policy, not an environmental adjunct.
Natural Infrastructure, Not Engineering Projects
Adaptation has long been framed as an engineering challenge: higher sea walls, drought-resistant crops, more efficient irrigation. But new scientific findings, one analysing soil resilience on land, the other examining the physics, chemistry and ecological integrity of continental shelf seas, show that the most critical infrastructure underpinning food security and climate stability is alive. And after decades of exploitation without maintenance, it is beginning to fail.
This warning arrives as scientists indicate the world has likely crossed its first major climate tipping point, with warm-water coral reefs passing a threshold from which they may never recover. Coral collapse is not only an ecological event: it destabilises fisheries, coastal protection, tourism and GDP across entire regions. It demonstrates how natural infrastructure can shift abruptly once strained, with consequences that cascade through markets.
MORE FOR YOU
Soils and shelf seas have not yet reached such thresholds, but signals are moving in the same direction: weakening buffers, rising stress and compounding economic risks.
Soil: The World’s Most Under-Valued Natural Infrastructure Asset
The Save Soil Adaptation Report argues that soil must be understood not as a resource but as infrastructure, an operating system for the economy that regulates water, carbon, nutrients and crop stability. Its performance depends on soil organic matter, the living component that builds structure, stores moisture and anchors productivity.
Praveena Sridhar, chief policy advisor at Save Soil, calls soil “the planet’s ultimate water bank and carbon vault,” adding, “To ignore it is to fail at climate adaptation itself.” The report shows why. Regenerative farms that rebuild soil organic matter retain up to 95% of their yields during droughts, outperforming conventional fields by two-thirds. Their soils hold “hundreds of thousands of extra litres of water per hectare,” acting both as flood management infrastructure and drought resilience.
Yet policy still treats soil as a consumable agricultural input rather than an asset essential to national security. As Sridhar notes, “We can’t adapt to climate change while ignoring the very foundation that feeds and protects us. Soil isn’t just an agricultural input, it’s a global and national infrastructure for survival.”
The economic implications are already visible. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy identifies soil erosion and fertility decline as direct threats to food security, with annual productivity losses exceeding CAD$3 billion. The 2021 Prairie drought, which cut yields by up to 40%, underscored the buffering role of healthy soils. Canada’s soils also store an estimated 150 billion tonnes of carbon, making stewardship both adaptation and mitigation.
In the UK, £2.4 billion is spent annually on agricultural support. Soil is central to environmental schemes, yet no binding soil-health targets exist. In the U.S. more than $200 billion a year flows to agriculture, while the soil that underpins food and climate security remains underprotected. These are not marginal environmental externalities; they are structural infrastructure liabilities.
For Anand Ethirajalu, project director for Cauvery Calling, the problem is conceptual. “People still see soil as dirt. But soil is a living system. If you don’t feed it, it dies,” he says. That “feeding” refers to rebuilding organic matter, the same biological process that gives seabed sediments their carbon-storage capacity offshore. When soil organic matter declines, structure weakens, yields fall and reliance on external inputs increases, amplifying both economic and climate vulnerability.
Because the majority of global food production depends on healthy soil, soil instability is not a niche agronomic issue. It shapes inflation, labour markets, trade balances and geopolitical stability.
Marine Natural Infrastructure Is Under Strain
Offshore, another piece of living infrastructure is under growing pressure. Continental shelf seas, the shallow waters that provide most of the world’s seafood, also regulate climate through the continental shelf-sea carbon pump, a process that moves carbon from the atmosphere into deep ocean storage.
New analysis from the Convex Seascape Survey, combined with Dr Jamie Shutler’s analysis of 20 years of data offers some of the strongest evidence yet of how this pump works and why it is at risk. Shutler’s work shows that the ocean continues absorbing more carbon as emissions rise, but warns that absorption accelerates acidification and places further stress on marine ecosystems.
“While this carbon uptake has so far helped to reduce the climate impacts we experience on land,” he said in an interview, “it also drives ocean acidification as dissolved CO2 forms a weak acid. This isn’t good news for plankton, fish and coastal bivalves like mussels and oysters, as their habitats are shrinking. We get 95% of our seafood from these seas, so it’s also a serious food security issue.”
Professor Callum Roberts, senior scientist with the Convex Seascape Survey, reinforced the point explaining, “Cutting emissions remains the only way to keep our seafood safe for future generations. Without that, all our other important efforts will be fighting a losing battle.” He describes seabed sediment layers as the ultimate repositories, capable of storing carbon for centuries if left intact. But bottom trawling, still widespread globally, breaks apart those layers, releasing stored carbon and destroying nursery habitats essential for fish populations.
In an interview he said, “We’ve got to give these systems space to recover. If we don’t, the consequences will be felt everywhere.” The parallels with soil are direct. Declining organic matter weakens soil’s ability to store water and carbon; disturbed, acidifying seabeds lose their capacity to store carbon and support fisheries. In both cases, biological degradation precedes economic instability.
Integrating Natural Infrastructure Into Markets
If soil and shelf seas were treated like other forms of infrastructure — like power grids, ports or water systems — the policy and investment landscape would shift rapidly. Much of the guidance already exists.
Governments already have clear direction on how to integrate natural infrastructure into economic decision-making. The UK’s Dasgupta Review calls on finance ministries to embed natural-capital accounts into budgets, reform incentive structures and treat ecosystem decline as a macroeconomic risk. The UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), now an official international statistical standard, provides the methodology for tracking ecosystem assets, carbon stocks and degradation in national balance sheets. Countries using SEEA to guide land and water policy show how natural infrastructure can be managed like other public assets.
Investors are being asked to take parallel steps. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) lays out a TCFD-style framework for governance, risk management and target-setting around nature-related risk. Central-bank research supports the financial materiality of this shift: the Dutch Central Bank’s Indebted to Nature study found that biodiversity risk affects banking-book exposures and should be integrated into portfolio risk assessment. Investor coalitions such as PRI provide operational guidance on setting biodiversity policies, stewardship expectations and engagement strategies.
Insurers, directly exposed to the convergence of climate and nature risks, are moving in the same direction. are moving in the same direction. The Sustainable Insurance Forum’s report on Nature-related Risks in the Insurance Sector recommends incorporating ecosystem-service dependency into underwriting, investment decisions and disclosure. The Swiss Re Institute has quantified ecosystem-service decline as a material underwriting and macro-risk factor, and has developed methods to integrate biodiversity into risk models, capital allocation and reinsurance. The OECD’s work on climate-risk and insurance further shows how supporting nature-based solutions and offering risk-reduction incentives can lower long-term losses.
Together, this analysis points to a simple conclusion: treating soil and seabed as infrastructure is not a conceptual exercise. It is the next step in financial and economic risk governance.
Natural Infrastructure Is Now An Economic Imperative
If the last century defined infrastructure as steel, concrete and silicon, this one must expand that definition to include the living systems that support the global economy. Healthy soils and functioning shelf seas are not environmental luxuries. They are infrastructure regulating water, fertility, carbon, temperature and food supply.
And as with any critical infrastructure, once they fail, everything built on top of them becomes unstable. The overlooked risk now confronting global markets is not the loss of nature in the abstract, it is the slow unravelling of the natural infrastructure modern economies quietly depend on.