MEET THE EXPERT  ·  Núria Garcia-Forner

Imagine two nature-based solutions projects. The first promises to plant 10 million trees across 50,000 hectares. The second promises to restore 8,000 hectares working with 200 local smallholder families through a cooperative that has been operating in the region for 12 years. Which one would most investors choose? "In my experience, the first," says Núria Garcia-Forner, Project Manager and Senior Analyst on Xilva’s Nature-based Solutions team. "And that, right there, is the problem."

The numbers in the first project are bigger. The pitch is cleaner. The metric — hectares, trees — is easy to communicate to a board. But headline metrics do not tell you whether a project is ecologically sound, socially accepted, financially viable, or likely to endure. They are the beginning of the story, not the end of it.

Few people inside Xilva are better placed to make that case than Núria Garcia-Forner, Xilva’s Senior Nature-based Solutions Analyst. Before joining the company, she spent years studying terrestrial ecosystems as a scientist — and the move from research into investment due diligence, she says, taught her that the metrics easiest to report are often the least informative about whether a project will actually deliver. 

In this conversation, the first in our Meet the Expert series, she walks us through what four and a half years and over 100 project assessments have taught her about the gap between the pitch and the performance. 

From tree death to due diligence

Núria’s academic career focused on terrestrial ecology — specifically, on understanding the mechanisms of drought-induced mortality in trees. Why do trees die when water is scarce? What makes some species resilient and others fragile? She spent years researching these questions at CREAF, the Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Centre in Spain, and subsequently at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, studying them down to the cellular and physiological level.

"It was precise, technical work," she reflects. "And it taught me something that has proved to be unexpectedly transferable: the headline indicators of forest health are not always the most meaningful ones, while the processes with the greatest long-term consequences often unfold below the surface — remaining invisible until it is too late."

Four and a half years ago, Núria left academia with a specific goal: to help turn scientific knowledge into practical action and bring it into real investment decisions. She joined Xilva, where she now supports the development of the Xilva GRADE due diligence framework, a live methodology, and co-leads assessments of nature-based solutions projects across four continents. To date, she has contributed to over 100 project assessments — covering agroforestry, forest restoration, and conservation — across Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe.

"What I have learned," she says, "is that the gap between what a project claims and what it can actually deliver is almost never primarily technical. It is social, economic, and organizational."

NbS projects are not just carbon projects

This is the insight Núria returns to most often — and the one she believes most investors are least prepared for.

"A project can have a robust carbon model," she explains. "It can have an appropriate restoration approach, credible species selection, and genuine ecological potential. And it can still fail to deliver — or fail to generate the value that funders expect — if the social and economic foundations are not in place."

Incentive structures matter, she argues—but they are only part of the picture. Where communities hold rights over the land and resources involved, they are not simple stakeholders to be consulted, beneficiaries to be rewarded, or participants to be persuaded. They must have a meaningful role in shaping the project and deciding whether and how it proceeds. That means understanding local priorities, land-use practices and livelihood needs from the outset and embed this into the decision making process. In Núria’s view, these are not soft considerations — they determine whether a project is legitimate, whether it can endure over 20 or 40 years, and whether the outcomes investors paid for actually materialise.

"A project can have a strong carbon model, the right species, and genuine ecological potential. And it can still fail if the incentives, governance, or local relationships are not in place."
— Núria Garcia-Forner, Project Manager & Senior Analyst, Nature-based Solutions, Xilva

Governance matters too. "A well-written project description can mask an implementation structure that is underdeveloped, fragmented, or poorly resourced," Núria says. "I have reviewed projects that were beautifully packaged for investors — professional presentations, polished documents, fluent use of the language that sustainability officers want to hear, while the local operational layer remained at an early stage. The team responsible for delivery had not yet built the relationships with local communities and local implementation partners. The capacity to implement the proposed activities was genuinely uncertain."

"This is not necessarily deliberately misleading," she adds. "More often, it is entrepreneurial optimism, combined with a communication style calibrated to attract investment rather than to communicate uncertainty transparently. And it is one of the most common patterns we encounter."

The carbon number problem

There is a second issue Núria believes is insufficiently discussed in the field, particularly given how central carbon estimates have become to investment decisions.

"Carbon models are necessary tools," she says. "But they are models. They simplify reality, select certain variables, exclude others, and carry uncertainty that is often not adequately communicated to buyers. Ecosystems are shaped by interacting processes, and optimising for carbon can involve trade-offs with water availability, biodiversity, soil health, livelihoods or long-term resilience. When carbon numbers are treated as if they were equivalent to the project itself — rather than one proxy for one dimension — those trade-offs, and much of the information to assess the project properly gets lost."

For instance, in arid and semi-arid landscapes widespread across Africa and also in other continents, as Núria explains, restoration and reforestation projects must navigate sharp trade-offs between carbon sequestration, water availability and long-term resilience.

"In some of these landscapes," she continues, "reducing tree density, managing water consumption carefully, or even selectively limiting carbon stocks in the short term is exactly what the ecosystem needs for long-term resilience. But if the performance system primarily rewards more carbon, these ecologically intelligent approaches become commercially disadvantaged. A project that manages water carefully and builds a resilient, locally adapted ecosystem can appear less impressive on a carbon spreadsheet than one that plants fast-growing species densely and generates high early-stage credits that may not persist through the first serious drought."

"The best nature-based solutions are not always the ones that maximise carbon. Sometimes, the most ecologically sound decision is to produce less of it in the short term."
— Núria Garcia-Forner, Project Manager & Senior Analyst, Nature-based Solutions, Xilva

This, in Núria’s view, is not a fringe concern. It is a structural tension in how nature-based solutions are currently financed, and one that will become more visible as projects mature and face the realities of drought, fire, pest pressure, and climatic shifts.

What the field reveals that documents do not

Núria is a strong advocate for field visits as part of due diligence. Not because documents are unimportant — they are essential, she says — but because the information they provide is necessarily filtered and curated by the people who produced them.

"When you go to a project site," she explains, "you can cross-check what is in the documents against what is actually happening: who is present, what has been implemented, how local stakeholders understand the project and their role in it, whether the proposed activities are realistic given the resources, relationships, and local knowledge that actually exist. The key question is not only whether the project sounds credible, but whether the people responsible for implementation have the capacity, legitimacy, and relationships needed to deliver in practice."

"I have visited projects where the on-the-ground reality was considerably less developed than the documentation suggested," she says. "But I have also visited projects where the opposite was true: teams that, despite significant constraints, had a quality of judgment, local knowledge, and genuine commitment that was difficult to capture in any document. People worked not just to implement a project, but because they believed in what they were doing — for their communities, their landscapes, and the future they wanted to build."

What stays with her most from those visits, Núria says, is the commitment of the people involved. "Individuals who want to contribute, who are proud of their work, who are creating change for their families and creating better opportunities — for education, food security, the recovery of native species and local water streams. When you see that directly, through conversations and time spent in the field, the effort makes sense. It reinforces why rigorous due diligence matters: because it can protect and strengthen interventions that have real meaning for people and places."

The question every investor should be asking

After four and a half years assessing NbS projects, the question Núria most wishes more buyers would ask before committing is this: will this project still be aligned with our values, needs, and risk appetite in 20 years’ time?

"NbS projects are long-term by nature," she says. "The carbon sequestration that justifies investment today depends on forests and landscapes that must be sustained for decades. The social and environmental impacts that give projects their legitimacy take years to materialise. Buyers who approach these investments expecting the certainty of a bond, or the liquidity of an equity position should be prepared to develop approaches and tools that are capable of dealing with uncertainty or else they risk entering with the wrong expectations."

That does not mean early-stage projects should be avoided, she adds — many of the strongest projects she has reviewed are early-stage. "The question is not whether risk exists, but whether it is understood, whether the project has a credible plan to manage it, and whether the organizational and relational foundations for long-term impact are robust."

"Corporate buyers who want access to high-quality NbS projects in the future need to help build that pipeline now — not as buyers at the end of the process, but as partners willing to understand what early-stage development actually requires."
— Núria Garcia-Forner, Project Manager & Senior Analyst, Nature-based Solutions, Xilva

A careful reason for hope

Núria is not someone who reaches for optimism easily. She is a scientist and with that comes a grounding pragmatism. The limitations of the current NbS and voluntary carbon market are real, and she spends much of her professional life examining them closely.

But there is one development that gives her genuine encouragement: the rising level of understanding that due diligence, when fit-for-purpose, is more than a numbers game, and investors, journalists, standards bodies, and civil society are keen to understand how NbSs can be improved and scale. "Scrutiny, when applied well, is not simply a filter that eliminates projects," she says. "It is a force that improves them — that pushes developers to be more rigorous, more transparent, and more honest about what they know and what still needs to be resolved."

The risk, in her view, is that scrutiny becomes purely defensive: a layer of process and documentation that increases costs and complexity without helping decision making or improving outcomes. The opportunity is that it becomes something more useful — a way to distinguish projects that are genuinely ready from those that need more time, and to direct investment accordingly.

That distinction — between a project that looks good on paper and one that is actually ready to deliver for the long run — is, in Núria’s words, exactly what due diligence is for.

Xilva provides independent due diligence, assessment, and operational monitoring services to Nature-based Solutions investors globally. Our proprietary Xilva GRADE methodology offers a comprehensive assessment of NbS project quality, financial robustness, risk, and impact potential. Contact us if you would like to meet our experts.