Career Conversations: Beyond the Bottom Line, with Narayan Iyer at the Asian Development Bank
Narayan Iyer, principal natural resources and agriculture specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), leads the bank’s “Natural Capital Lab,” which recently put out a new guidance note on natural capital. They’re focused on valuing nature—mainstreaming assessments of ecosystems and their benefits to people in pursuit of a new, sustainable approach for development banks. Iyer himself hails from the world of wholesale banking. By bridging the gap between abstract ecosystem benefits and tangible financial assessments, Iyer and his team are not just funding projects—they are attempting to rewrite the methodology of development finance itself.
How would you describe your personal and professional identity?
NI: I'm an engineer by education and I hold an MBA. I grew up in India, and I currently live in Manila. What has always marked my life is curiosity. In my career, I've seen various aspects of wholesale banking [i.e., serving large clients like governments, corporations, and investment firms] and financial services, ranging from equities to credits to corporate banking, to investment banking, and now development finance. It's been a fairly diverse spectrum of financing that I've seen, and a good journey. I have always wanted to learn new things and expose myself to different perspectives, so that's really what has driven my career.
Briefly tell me about your role with the ADB.
NI: The ADB focuses on the Asia and Pacific region. We service both governments and the private sector under the same entity, providing catalytic loans, technical assistance, and other support for sustainable development. You can also look at ADB along sectors, and I work in one of our seven sectors: agriculture, food, nature, and rural development.
Within this sector, I work in what we call the “front office” which is a strategy and coordination group. We look for trends, for things that drive development needs in that sector. We try to use that information to develop our strategy and approach to, ultimately, inform projects that support the bank’s member countries.
Within the “front office” we also do special projects in pursuit of various strategic initiatives within the bank. And in those special projects, I focus a lot of my work on nature. So I lead, within ADB, what we call a “natural capital lab,” through which I work a lot with the NatCap team at Stanford.
What was your inspiration for getting involved in sustainability and natural capital?
NI: It was just serendipity. My manager was overseeing two particular departments, one was agriculture and the other was environment. A lot of work at the intersection of the two came my way. I've always been interested in nature, but not from a work point of view.
I found the idea of applying scientific methodologies to something that I considered as abstract as nature very appealing. I also come from a background of equities so I was very familiar with valuation. Applying natural capital valuation techniques was very interesting, and learning how to value something very different, such as nature, was very appealing. In valuing an ecosystem and the services that it provides, I could see a lot of parallels with the valuation methods I was already aware of.
[Natural capital] made a lot of sense then to me and that was what kept my interest in it and made me see a lot of possibilities. I still think that a lot more work can be done in this field. That keeps my interest going.
Tell me briefly about how you interface with NatCap.
NI: We are trying to mainstream assessments of ecosystems and their benefits within ADB, which means using these methods in projects.
Here in the Philippines, we are trying to employ nature-based solutions in some of our river basins. It's a large and exciting project [learn more about the 3Ps work in the Philippines!] because if you're successful in adding value to the project through natural capital assessments, that could go a long way in helping the mainstreaming effort. There is also interest from different countries to know more about natural capital approaches and maybe to employ assessments in projects there. I think we are riding a fairly good curve here. And I feel that in five years, a lot of projects will be informed by these assessments.
How have you seen the relationship between NatCap and the ADB grow?
NI: There's a good understanding, which is always required if you want to sustain a relationship. I think we do that well. We have a good give and take. The quality of engagement has grown. It helps that we have frequent visits as well. Some of the NatCap team was here in Manila this month for the forum that we organized. We've been coming to Stanford every year for the NatCap Symposium. And of course, we have weekly calls, which keep the momentum up.
We try a lot of things together, not all of them work out. But the engagement has progressed, to the extent that even if something doesn't work out, we gather ourselves and move on to the next attempt. There's a degree of comfort and we know what to expect with each other.
It's not very easy to institutionalize relationships. I've done client management—which is actually managing relationships—for many, many years across different aspects of wholesale banking. And I can tell you that mostly relationships are between individuals, and the organizations benefit. So, when individuals move, the relationships between the organizations are hugely at risk. And often if the individuals move to competing or similar organizations, the relationships also move. So institutionalizing relations is very important but challenging. In many ways, from an organization's point of view, that should be the objective. So how do you institutionalize it? Mainly through organized frameworks of engagement and multiple touchpoints. We have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) between our organizations, and we're trying to get more people within ADB engaged with the NatCap work.
Are there any kernels of wisdom that you found that allow long-term organizational relationships to persevere?
NI: From a long-term relationship perspective, if you can’t secure a contract, that's not good, because then it all boils down to individuals. That's always a risk. But institutionalizing a method like natural capital assessments, that's probably a little easier, in the sense that if we do enough projects which demonstrate value, then natural capital gets embedded in the methodologies, and then that gets institutionalized. In some ways, that is also one of the objectives.
Tell me about ADB’s ‘technical assistance program’ developed for natural capital approaches and its genesis.
NI: We have hundreds of technical assistance projects, literally hundreds. These are projects under which multiple activities are defined, usually around one common theme. We have a natural capital technical assistance project that we got approved late last year whose objective is to encourage natural capital approaches and investment across the region. We have multiple technical assistance projects that touch natural capital themes, but this one is completely dedicated to natural capital. This technical assistance project was also started in conjunction with the new natural capital approach we're trying to embed. The work that we have done in the 3Ps project along with NatCap has played an important role in informing our new approach by demonstrating the potential of upstream assessments in project design.
How do natural capital approaches help you "translate" the value of nature into the financial terms, and then how does that affect the activities of the bank?
NI: We have this new approach to designing and implementing projects with strong natural capital elements. We actually launched this approach during the recent Asia and the Pacific Food Systems Forum 2026, with NatCap present.
The first pillar of this approach is to do natural capital assessments. So we are trying to embed assessments in our approach.
Tell me more about the recent forum ADB hosted.
NI: This forum is a four-day, biennial event. This year, we emphasized our new approach to transforming food systems in Asia and the Pacific, and our commitment to invest $40 billion by 2030 to support this transformation.
The forum covered food systems, ranging from agriculture value chains, to infrastructure, to nutrition, to country-specific sessions, and deep dives into how to transform food systems within specific countries.
Most of the sessions were 90 minutes, but the one on natural capital was a day-long event. We also had a training, led by the NatCap team, on natural capital assessments, which ran on one of the days over multiple sessions.
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