# Lydia Zemke Fellow ![Lydia Zemke, Fellow](/sites/g/files/omnuum6851/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-07/Lydia%20profile%20photo%201.png?itok=qd7dt6UP) email Lydia Zemke is a researcher and sustainability strategist focused on mobilizing private finance to support nature conservation and ecosystem restoration. Over the past decade, she has worked across international organizations, think tanks, consulting firms, and the private sector to identify scalable finance strategies that align systems with global environmental goals. During her PhD, she explored the dynamics of private finance for nature-based solutions in Kenya and Costa Rica, analyzing how public and private actors interact to shape investment in nature. She is currently a Fellow at Harvard University’s Davies Lab and serves as Senior Advisor to [EarthAcre](https://www.earthacre.com/), where she contributes to advancing Biodiversity Capacity, a metric grounded in well-established ecological relationships between species diversity and vegetation structure. Developed to address key limitations of existing biodiversity metrics, Biodiversity Capacity provides a scalable and standardized approach to assessing a landscape’s ability to sustain biodiversity and to monitor it over time. Her broader work spans nature finance, sustainability strategy, and innovation ecosystems, with a particular focus on how capital markets and entrepreneurs can drive transformative change for nature. - ## People Categories [Fellows](/people-categories/fellows)