What the OECD 2025 Report Means for Biodiversity-Credit Storytelling

Proof with a Pulse: how narrative transparency can make biodiversity credits credible

🧭 The global shift

In its 2025 report Scaling Up Biodiversity-Positive Incentives, the OECD calls for a rapid redesign of how the world funds nature. It urges governments and businesses to make biodiversity impact measurable, transparent and verifiable — and warns that without visible evidence, trust and investment will stall.

That’s the gap Purpose Built Films exists to fill.

💡 What the OECD actually said

“Transparency and verification are crucial for credible, efficient and effective biodiversity-positive incentives.” “Impacts beyond outputs are difficult to assess.” – ECCC Evaluation of the Conservation Exchange Pilot, 2024 “Clear evidence of impact can strengthen trust and mobilise finance.”

Across subsidies, offsets and emerging biodiversity-credit markets, the OECD’s message is consistent:integrity needs visibility.

🎥 Where storytelling fits

Data shows what happened.Storytelling shows why it matters and why you can trust it.

Purpose Built Films creates Narrative + Evidence stories that mirror the OECD’s “Integrity Five”:

1. Baseline – what existed before

2. Additionality – what changed because of intervention

3. Permanence – how it’s secured

4. Monitoring – how it’s measured

5. Verification & Equity – who checks, and who benefits

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Each film binds these to real people and places: the farmer restoring hedgerows, the ecologist tracking return species, the ledger entry that proves it.

🧩 Why it matters now

The OECD found that Canada’s Conservation Exchange pilot (funded by Aviva, Nutrien and TC Energy) faced low demand because its outcomes were invisible and “impacts beyond outputs” were hard to assess.Our work makes those impacts tangible — scientifically and emotionally.

🔗 The opportunity

High-integrity biodiversity credits will only scale when their stories are told with the same rigour as their science.That’s what we build: transparent visual evidence that protects integrity, attracts investors, and earns public trust.

Belief is built with receipts.

📩 If you’re developing or funding biodiversity-credit projects and want to make your results visible — not just measurable — get in touch ➜ hello@purposebuiltfilms.com

🌿 Beyond Measurement: Why the Nature Economy Needs a Narrative Layer

The invisible revolution

We can now measure life with exquisite precision. DNA in a drop of water can reveal the species that live nearby. Satellites track the pulse of forests. AI can count the heartbeat of ecosystems.

But the Nature Economy - the vast, emerging system that will finance biodiversity recovery - is still invisible. It lives in dashboards, spreadsheets, and scientific reports.The public can’t see it. Investors can’t feel it. And without that emotional connection, belief falters.

We’ve built the metrics. Now we need the meaning.

The trust gap

Carbon markets taught us a hard lesson: data isn’t enough.When people couldn’t see the impact of their investment, trust collapsed.Biodiversity markets risk the same fate if they remain abstract - numbers without faces, uplifts without stories.

Data builds confidence. Story builds belief.

That belief is what turns ecological progress into market momentum.

The missing layer

At Purpose Built Films, we call it the Narrative Layer - the storytelling infrastructure of the Nature Economy.

It’s the visible, emotional proof that connects measurement to meaning.

When a project reports a biodiversity gain, the Narrative Layer provides the human evidence:a short, cinematic film that shows the people, the land, and the transformation behind the data.

Together, the measurement and the story form a complete trust stack:Measurement → Verification → Story → Belief.

The map of stories

We’re building what we call the Map of Stories - a living, digital atlas where every verified restoration site has its own film.

Each pin represents not just data, but a narrative:who’s restoring the land, what’s changing, and why it matters. Click → watch → believe.

Where others map change, we map meaning.

The Map of Stories will sit alongside existing data platforms - complementing them with a visible, emotional layer. It’s how the Nature Economy will learn to speak in pictures again.

Story as infrastructure

Markets are built on trust. Trust is built on story.

Story isn’t decoration. It’s infrastructure. It’s the connective tissue that links investors to projects, policymakers to outcomes, and communities to hope.

Without narrative, the Nature Economy risks becoming just paperwork about life.With narrative, it becomes something people can believe in - and back.

A call to collaborators

We’re inviting scientists, data companies, banks, and restoration projects to join us.If you’re measuring life, we’ll make it visible.

Together, we can build the narrative layer that the Nature Economy needs.Because before anything can be restored, it has to be believed in.

We don’t market nature — we make it believable. www.purposebuiltfilms.com

Running Until the Fog Lifts

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to think clearly.

Not just ‘make good decisions’ or ‘be more productive’, but something deeper than that - a kind of inner clarity. Seeing the world directly, without the haze. No mental loops, no self-talk, no background hum. Just presence. Awake, alert, tuned in to the moment I’m in.

But it’s rare. Most days, my thoughts are stuck in traffic. There’s a song on repeat in my head. A phrase I said in the wrong tone of voice three days ago. A hundred tabs open in my brain and none of them loading. I’ve always assumed this was part of how I’m wired - ADHD, or something like it. And for a long time, I treated it like a problem to solve.

Clarity became the holy grail. I meditated. I ran. I read books on attention, consciousness, flow states, hallucinogens. I even became a filmmaker - partly, I suspect, because film is the most complete tool I know for showing what clarity looks like. Light, music, rhythm, emotion - all woven together to create a moment of pure, guided perception. It’s no wonder I was drawn to it. It’s the medium that best mimics the feeling I was chasing.

Then one day, I read Will Storr’s excellent book ‘A Story is a Deal’. And suddenly I realised, most people aren’t living in clarity either. They’re living in noise. In the static of half-processed stories. In the pull of the past and the pressure of imagined futures. Our brains are narrative engines. We fill in blanks. We project motives. We relive old arguments and rehearse new ones. We are, by nature, distracted.

That’s not an accident. It’s part of the human condition.

There’s a Fiona Apple song that ends with the refrain; ‘I. . . want to feel everything’; Trent Reznor said a similar thing (although slightly more aggressively). That’s how I’ve always felt - I wanted to experience the world vividly, not as a blur. I became a biologist - not out of some great love for the scientific method - in fact both my degrees were the best example of the wrong shape being jammed into a hole I can imagine - but to dangle from treetops, to explore caves, to scour the earth for those fleeting moments of beauty that hide in plain sight in the natural world. I sailed tall ships, I crossed both the Pacific and the Atlantic in open boats, I lived in cities and wildernesses, and swam in frozen lakes. I wanted to see the world with both eyes open wide, and I wanted to do it all the time.

But the truth is, most people don’t experience reality directly. We experience a story about reality. That’s our umwelt - the German word for the slice of the world each creature can perceive. A bee sees ultraviolet light. A dolphin feels in sonar. A human tells a story.

We live in stories, whether we mean to or not. That’s why we have myths, politics, branding, religions, movies, therapy, nationalism, self-doubt. It’s why we argue about who’s right instead of asking what’s true. It’s why two people can see the same event and walk away with two completely different versions of what happened. We aren’t just seeing facts - we’re interpreting them through a framework. Often unconsciously.

“If a lion could speak”, said Wittgenstein, “we wouldn’t understand him”. Because a lion’s experience of the world is so fundamentally different from ours, we wouldn’t share the reference points. The symbols. The mental scaffolding. Dolphins see the world in a reflected vision of clicks and whistles, they dream in three dimensions. Their mental labels for other animals likely aren’t words, they’re shapes, textures, movement. Humans see 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum with our three photoreceptors - mantis shrimp have 16 kinds of photoreceptors. 

But who’s to say humans all experience the world the same? Soft White Underbelly has over 6 million followers on Youtube alone - a page dedicated to telling the stories of people with lives so vastly different to the status quo that each one is like nothing you’ve ever heard before - but there is something in each of these stories that resonates with us. Hearing someone tell their story - their background, the experiences that shaped their lives and how they see the world - is fascinating to us.

We are all living in a different kind of story. Some with more noise. Some where perception is slippery. In reality, a universal “truth” feels like a radio signal you can almost - but not quite - tune into.

And yet, for me at least, there are moments when I catch a glimpse of something that feels universal. Fleeting, but real. Where the fog lifts. Where I’m not listening to my story, I’m just in all of our stories together. Usually it happens when I’m running, or swimming, or sitting still for long enough that my brain gets bored of its own patterns. Sometimes it comes through film - when I’m deep in the edit, or behind the camera, and everything else fades.

In those moments, I remember that clarity isn’t a default state. It’s something we touch, briefly, like a glint of sun through trees. 

Now my goal isn’t to live in clarity, but to return to it, now and then. To build habits, practices, and ways of working that let me remember what it feels like. And to know that those moments help shape the rest of the noise.

And that’s part of why I make films. Not just because I love stories, but because stories are the world, as humans experience it. They’re not separate from reality - they are our reality. And if we can tell better stories, truer stories, more emotionally honest stories, maybe we get closer to clarity. Even just for a second.

Someone once said to me during a meeting, in an offhand way that totally belied the abrupt change in direction my life took because of hearing it, “to be a better species, we need to tell better stories”. In a world so utterly connected and at the same time disjointed and fractured, where as the late David Berman said, “every day [we’re] playing chicken with oblivion” - there has never been a more important time to tell - and listen to - the stories around us. And to understand that they’re just that - 

stories.