Thank you to David Hall (Policy Director) and the team at Toha for sharing your story with us. At the Impact Investing Network, our mission is to educate and connect the impact investing sector in Aotearoa, helping to channel capital towards innovative companies like Toha that are driving meaningful change—both locally in New Zealand and globally.
This is our first deep dive into Toha, and we’re excited to showcase their work and impact. Read on to discover how Toha is shaping the future of impact investing in Aotearoa. In this interview with David, you’ll learn about Toha’s vision, how they’re unlocking new ways to fund environmental action, and what’s next for their journey.
About Toha
Can you tell us about Toha and what inspired its focus on biodiversity, innovative finance, and community-led environmental solutions?
Toha Network was founded in 2018 to build an impact investment marketplace that bridges the gap between investors and frontline communities to address challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.
What makes Toha distinctive is our founding principle of data sovereignty for all. This is the idea that everybody should ideally have influence over data that represents them and their interests, especially by exercising consent over how such data is used. Nature markets are dependent on massive volumes of data – often highly sensitive data – and if market providers cannot protect that data from foreseeable risks, we believe those markets will lose their social licence to operate. In this, the Toha Network is inspired by the Indigenous data sovereignty (IDSov) movement, but we maintain that data sovereignty ought to be a concern for everyone. Accordingly, we are committed to data sovereignty as a minimum operational requirement for nature markets – and for impact markets generally.
What have been the key milestones in Toha’s development?
Fresh in my mind is last year’s UN Biodiversity Conference COP16 in Cali, Colombia. We held an official side event on IDSov in nature markets, and also met with our peers in the UNDP, TNFD and Biodiversity Credits Alliance. It was tremendous to receive international validation of Toha’s core hypotheses, especially the importance of IDSov for the future legitimacy of nature markets.
However, the most pivotal moment in Toha’s recent history was Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023. It really marked the shift of the Toha Network from an R&D phase to a demonstration phase. Most visibly, we created the East Coast Exchange (ECX) as a demonstration of Toha’s digital capabilities in enabling community-led climate adaptation. We also brought forward the transition of the Toha Network to an ecosystem of entities, which provides the separation of network functions that can sustain trust in Toha’s data stewardship. This, in turn, enabled us to advance our pipeline of pilots, starting with the nature data transaction at Te Kautuku in partnership with Air New Zealand and Te Puni Kōkiri. It is a point of pride that this pilot fulfils key recommendations from the Ministerial Inquiry into Land Use to deliver a proof-of-concept co-investment arrangement for whenua Māori. In that sense, the cyclone was a true test of Toha’s MVP: if we couldn’t be of value to Te Tai Rāwhiti at that moment, then what was all this for?
One lesson I take from this experience is that chance and circumstance play a critical role in the innovation process. The cyclone triggered a critical shift for Toha, as long as we were open to responding to it. I’m in awe of our Tairāwhiti-based team, especially Nathalie Whitaker and Renee Raroa, for being able to hear the messages that the cyclone brought to the region. However, there is no way that Toha could have responded like it did – the ECX was stood up in a matter of days and weeks – without deep-diving into R&D in the years earlier. Our early investors afforded us a precious opportunity to prepare for such moments. So, yes, chance and circumstance were formative, but so too was the willingness of Toha’s investors and co-founders to take risks in anticipation of future impact.
Can you explain how Toha’s marketplace for impact works?
The Toha Network is extending digital public infrastructure (DPI) to trusted nature markets.
I think of DPI as shared digital systems for human enablement. It involves digital tools that we already use in our daily lives – like digital payment systems, data sharing, identity authentication, et cetera. However, these tools are oriented toward public purpose, toward the creation of public value. That’s the P in DPI. In Toha’s case, we are steering this digital infrastructure toward addressing the public challenge of food security in the context of climate change and nature degradation.
Toha’s DPI stack has three key parts. Firstly, a measurement platform which uses data templates to track impact. Secondly, a data sharing system to facilitate the secure and sovereign exchange of impact data. And, thirdly, digital payment systems so that participants can pay for, and be paid for, impact data.
Together, these are joined up as an integrated system to enable transactions between impact-oriented investors and communities at the frontline of environmental challenges. We call this “the missing market infrastructure” which enables these parties to discover one another, and to mutually realise the full value of nature-related data.
Understanding the Impact Marketplace and Impact Trading
What are ‘claim templates,’ and how do they help the private and public sectors mobilise towards a more transparent, accountable, and sustainable impact?
Essentially, these are data templates, designed by subject matter experts, which capture the data needed to verify the sustainability-related claims of businesses or investors. These might be claims around carbon removals, biodiversity enhancement, regenerative farming, community consent, water quality improvement, or whatever else. A claim template sets out the data requirements for high-integrity claims, so businesses can disclose nature-related impact with confidence.
Crucially, in the Toha system, the claim-maker does not buy the data outright. Rather, they purchase data access rights which enables them to make verifiable claims of impact. This upholds data sovereignty by ensuring that the ownership of the data remains with the data provider – that is, with the frontline communities who commit to delivering impact and collecting data to prove it. This also means that ongoing commercial benefits from the data will accrue to the frontline, which is where it rightly belongs.
This reveals the spirit of reciprocity that underpins the Toha economy: it is designed to reallocate value fairly in the system, in proportion to the risk that participants carry. It is frontline communities – farmers, Indigenous peoples, local communities – who are most exposed to climate vulnerability and ecological breakdown. So, their work to strengthen landscape resilience must be properly resourced, not only for their own benefit, but also the benefit of regional and national economies.
Could you share how this digital public infrastructure is accelerating cross-sector collaboration on climate and environment challenges?
DPI creates new possibilities for radical collaboration across sectors and geographies. The Toha Network is really a local expression of a larger global movement toward using digital technologies, especially Web3 tools like digital tokens, to enable new forms of cooperation and coordinated action. It’s the world of collaborative technology described in books like Plurality, Web3, and Read, Write, Own.
To use our Te Kautuku pilot as an example, because investors are releasing funds through the purchase of digital tokens, there is no need to coordinate with other investors in the same project. This significantly reduces the transaction costs of co-investment, which typically involves expensive contracting among the various parties. This also enables the creation of claim stacks where multiple investors can co-invest in different aspects of a single project. In a regenerative farming project, for instance, a food distribution company might want carbon removal claims from on-farm vegetation for insetting purposes; a downstream supermarket chain might want claimable impacts on threatened species for its SBTN targets; and a government department might want reporting data for catchment-level analysis of ecological connectivity. All this can be easily accommodated by digital token transactions, with the farm business benefiting on the upside of each transaction. This turns nature data from a burden on farmers to an opportunity, essentially another type of agricultural yield that sits alongside food and fibre.
Another example is how the Toha system interacts with the knowledge sector. For our claim templates, we defer to the expertise of others, whether it’s ecologists or other scientists, holders of mātauranga Māori, or local communities. Those knowledge holders are welcome to formalise their knowledge as a data template for use in the Toha marketplace. Crucially, these template developers also retain ownership of the measurement templates they develop, and license them to Toha for use in the marketplace. As this happens, fees are collected and allocated back to the template developer as royalties. This creates incentives for template developers to make the templates as good as they can be, striking the right balance between integrity and ease of use. Perhaps more importantly, it puts this knowledge to work, helping communities, business and governments to solve real-world challenges.
The Future of Impact Investing, Innovative and Regenerative Finance from Toha's perspective
What role does Toha Network see itself playing within and supporting the impact investing and impact management space?
Our role is infrastructure provider. We are laying the groundwork for others to provide nature-positive goods and services, especially a secure supply of claimable impacts and associated data. Our tools enable farmers, whenua Māori trusts and other land stewards to provide the solutions that the world needs, not as recipients of grants or handouts, rather as valued providers of essential services in a resilient economy.
Of course, at this stage, as a test marketplace, we need to be our own customer. We have created our own use-cases, like the East Coast Exchange, to demonstrate how the Toha system works. As the platform matures, however, it will become increasingly self-organising, which is necessary because these challenges are too complex for central planning. It is vital to unlock local knowledge, insights and experience.
In that sense, we are agnostic about what the Toha system is used for, as long as activities in the marketplace are making genuine contributions to international commitments like the Paris Agreement and Convention on Biological Diversity. We are a member of the UN-led Biodiversity Credits Alliance, for instance, but we are not committed to biodiversity credits per se. Certainly, such credits could be issued on our system and would benefit from our approach to data sovereignty. But our data infrastructure could underpin many other instruments, like direct stewardship payments, investment into nature data for reporting and disclosure, supply chain emissions mitigation, sustainability-linked loans, et cetera. Ultimately, it depends on where demand shows up – and it’s far from obvious that voluntary markets will show up at scale for biodiversity credits in the near-term.
What’s next for Toha? What should the impact investment community keep an eye on?
We have a pipeline of forthcoming pilots and partnerships, here in Aotearoa and internationally too, which we will announce in due course. What is so exciting is that these pilots do more to communicate the value and potential of the Toha system than any single explanation we can give. Toha is a systemic solution to a highly complex set of challenges, so it is inherently difficult to communicate. But, like Visa, you don’t need to perfectly understand how it works to have trust in it. Rather, you trust it because it works when you need it to. With each successful transaction, the mechanics of the Toha system can fade further into the background. Our pilots serve as pinpoints of market validation which, eventually, will add up to a whole-of-system view.
Also keep an eye out for the launch of the International Environmental Guardianship (IEG), which Toha is a founding member of. The IEG is evolving from the Communities Advisory Panel, a global representative body for Indigenous peoples and local communities that sits alongside the UN-led Biodiversity Credits Alliance. However, the IEG will have a broader mandate for nature markets – including but not limited to biodiversity credits – with a strong focus on the rights of nature as inseparable from the rights of peoples and communities. Given the ominous state of global affairs, the IEG promises to be a hopeful innovation in international governance.
Toha’s approach to funding environmental action is an exciting example of how impact investment can drive real change. It’s been great to dive into their work and learn more about how they’re unlocking new ways to support regenerative projects across Aotearoa.
We appreciate David Hall and the Toha team for sharing their insights and journey with us. If you found this conversation inspiring, we encourage you to explore more about Toha and how impact investment can accelerate positive change. Stay connected with the Impact Investing Network for more stories, insights, and opportunities to support purpose-driven initiatives.
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