Nature Backers: How Employee Collective Action can Connect ESG to Real-World Impact

At the Nature Tech Collective (NTC), our community is our greatest asset. We thrive on the innovation that emerges when passionate leaders connect, and a prime example was on full display at our recent NTC Demo Day. Karen Hardy, founder of Nature Wired, unveiled Nature Backers, an engagement platform developed with support from Carbon Sustain, led by Paul Bryzek. This solution, born from collaboration within our ecosystem, tackles one of the biggest challenges in sustainability today.

Bridging the Critical Gap in Corporate ESG

Corporations are channeling billions into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives, yet a critical gap persists. As Karen Hardy, CEO of Nature Wired highlighted during her presentation, "less than 5% of that spend is reaching nature-based projects." This is a sentiment we at the NTC hear echoed throughout our network. Much of this investment remains in back-office, compliance-driven activities, leaving employees, customers, and communities feeling disconnected from the impact.

This is the challenge Nature Wired set out to solve. Their solution, Nature Backers, is an engagement platform that allows companies to engage their workforce in supporting UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-aligned, nature projects, by enabling  employees to earn and apply participation awards to projects their company supports. Developed in partnership with Carbon Sustain, the platform integrates with Hedera Guardian, an open-source infrastructure for digitizing and tokenizing environmental assets. Using the Guardian Indexer, Nature Backers can surface verified projects ranked by SDG alignment. Every employee action is recorded on the Hedera public ledger, creating a unique digital fingerprint, that ensures transparency, immutability, and a clear audit-ready trail that connects ESG budgets directly to verifiable impact. As the market shifts toward carbon forward purchasing, Nature Backers helps companies secure high-quality credits early and, linking employee engagement to lasting climate impact.

Why Platforms Like This Are an Industry Imperative

The Nature Backers platform is an important piece of ecosystem infrastructure that addresses the core barriers slowing the adoption of nature tech.

First, it tackles the corporate engagement gap. With a 16% increase in Fortune 500 companies setting nature targets since 2022, the demand is there, but the pathways for meaningful investment are not always clear. Platforms like this empower internal champions and give leadership valuable data on what resonates with their teams, helping to close the estimated $700 billion annual nature-finance gap. For example, companies can pair employee engagement with carbon forward agreements, locking in future impact at today’s prices and aligning procurement with workforce values.

Second, it builds trust in a market that desperately needs it. Our "State of Nature Tech" report identified the complexity of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) as a key barrier to scaling nature-based solutions. By providing an immutable and transparent ledger of engagement, Nature Backers exemplifies the kind of credible, data-driven tools needed to build investor confidence and unlock finance for nature.

The Power of Collective Action Within Corporations

The true innovation here lies in unlocking the latent power of the corporate workforce to drive systemic change. Nature Backers provides the mechanism to channel the distributed energy of thousands of employees into a single, focused stream of capital and commitment. It proves that by organizing and acting collectively within large systems, we can generate a multiplier effect, enabling a scale of impact that is both significant and inspiring.

This model moves beyond the limits of personal responsibility and demonstrates a more strategic truth: when we organize and act together within large systems, our collective impact becomes exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.

The development of Nature Backers reflects the NTC's core belief: when we break down silos and connect the right people with the right technology, we can accelerate the transition to a nature-positive world. Nature Wired, as the creator of Nature Backers, worked with Carbon Sustain as a strategic development partner to bring this vision to life.  Together, they are demonstrating how participation, transparency, and collective, measurable impact can reshape the future of ESG..

Nature Wired is now offering pilot programs for corporations and referral partnerships for Hedera Guardian ecosystem partners. We encourage our community to connect with Karen and her team to explore how to bring this powerful new tool for engagement and impact to your organization.

For more information on Nature Backers, watch this video here or drop Nature Wired a line at hello@naturewired.earth.