Izzy Fenwick's presentation at Tourism Summit introduced a new way of thinking about sustainability for the tourism industry. While operators are already doing significant work in this space, Fenwick reframed sustainability as a core business strategy - showing that protecting and investing in nature is not charity, but essential for good business. Fenwick, a climate strategist and guardian of The Aotearoa Circle, opened with a story every operator could relate to: a crisis meeting about a critical supplier on the brink of collapse.

The following article has been provided by Izzy to capture the essence of her presentation.

Tourism's most critical supplier is failing - and it's not who you think 

“Imagine,” she began, “your operations manager bursts in, not because the booking app crashed, but because they’ve discovered your entire business depends on one supplier. No one realised it till now because they deliver such a wide range of services, but they all trace back to the same parent company." 

‘We never did proper due diligence because they’ve been with us since the very beginning. We’ve never stress-tested their capacity or invested in their development. And we’ve actually been underpaying them - or more accurately, haven’t really paid them at all. Their invoices got lost in the mail. There’s no alternate vendor. No one can do what they do.’

‘If we had to recreate what they provide, it would cost billions in capex and infrastructure we don’t have, and never could.’” Fenwick paused. “What would you do? You’d be on the phone in seconds, right? Calling that supplier, calling every other operator who uses them, trying to find a solution.” Her punchline: that supplier is nature. 

She went on to highlight how no one in this room would tolerate that risk profile inside their business - a single-source supplier, no backups, no maintenance plan, no relationship management. "And yet that is exactly what we are doing with nature. So let’s meet that supplier shall we! Nature Ltd! As we know, the company is made up of several highly specialised departments."

Fenwick went on to frame, Nature Ltd. as a full-service provider whose divisions underpin every part of the visitor economy.

• The Water Division: everything from sanitation and snowmaking to vineyard irrigation and the clean drinking water handed to guests.
• The Air & Climate Team: regulates temperatures, weather, and even the “four seasons in one day” our brand markets abroad.
• The Land & Soils Department: stabilises slopes, roads, and vineyards - “that’s not scenery,” Fenwick reminded the room, “that’s infrastructure.”
• The Biodiversity Unit: the marketing department we didn’t know we had - tūī soundtracks, whale breaches, and glow-worm constellations that define New Zealand’s brand identity.

Every operator, she warned, is entirely dependent on these divisions. Yet most have treated them like unpaid contractors: “visibly degrading, chronically under-funded, with no contingency and terrible relationship management.”

Nature, Fenwick told the room, doesn’t quietly resign. She sends in the debt collector — climate change - “a mobster collecting overdue invoices in the form of floods, storms, and droughts.” Her point: climate change isn’t the root problem, it’s the symptom of decades of ecological overdraft.

“Our wetlands, which once acted like kidneys filtering stormwater, are down to scraps,” she said. “Ninety percent are gone. Our soils are washing away - 182 million tonnes every year, roughly a dump-truck load every second. And nearly half our monitored groundwater sites now show nitrate levels rising.”

For an industry built on natural beauty and clean water, the numbers were sobering. “We can’t hide behind the clean, green image anymore,” Fenwick said. “Underneath the brand, the systems are degrading.”

To drive it home, Fenwick invited the audience into an imaginary “Nature Ltd. shop.” Behind the counter stood Natalie, the personification of nature herself - cheerful, helpful, and out of stock. “Some native forest? Sorry, those are in short supply. Clean rivers? Only available with microplastics and stormwater add-ons. Stable climate? Discontinued until 2050, depending on global targets.” The laughter in the room was uneasy. When Fenwick delivered the final line - “We can’t keep restocking what’s been stripped from the shelves, but if you’re ready to co-invest, we can rebuild the inventory” - the metaphor had become a business case.

Fenwick flipped the standard sustainability narrative on its head. “We talk about economic growth all the time,” she said, “but if we want to keep any of it, we need a growth strategy for nature too.” Conservation, she argued, is not a growth plan. “Conservation says, ‘Try not to lose more.’ Growth says, ‘Imagine what more would look like.’”

When businesses invest in nature, they’re not engaging in charity; they’re protecting assets. A wetland becomes stormwater infrastructure. A forest becomes flood insurance. A reef becomes a living breakwater. She cited an example from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where hotels and insurers created the world’s first reef insurance policy - a collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, Swiss Re, and the World Bank. “A coral reef became an insurance policy,” Fenwick said. “That’s what real adaptation looks like - protecting nature because it protects you.” The call to action was clear: treat regeneration as risk management.

“Every business tracks its capital - financial, human, intellectual,” Fenwick said. “But there’s a fifth form: natural capital - the stock of soils, water, air, and biodiversity that make all the others possible. We’ve been managing revenue while ignoring depreciation.” Healthy ecosystems, she explained, compound value over time. Degraded ones accrue interest like unpaid debt until the system defaults. “We’ve been running the economy off nature’s credit card,” she said. “The bill has arrived.”

To close, Fenwick returned to her storytelling. In her final scene, the audience checked into The Last Resort, where native forests were “converted to pasture and pine,” rivers were polluted, and the thermostat - climate stability - was broken. Then came the upgrade offer: The Restoration Suite. “It’s not a place,” she smiled, “it’s a mindset.” 

The takeaway was simple and unforgettable: “Nature isn’t a backdrop to your business - she is your business. Protecting her isn’t charity. It’s just good business.” For an industry grappling with climate shocks, that message hit home. Fenwick’s metaphor may have been poetic, but her warning was pure commercial logic: no operator survives the loss of their most critical supplier.