Introduction

Conservation Finance: Towards a new model for landscape restoration

Background¶

Several articles in this book and the underlying pilot project were originally supported by a California Department of Water Resources, Integrated Regional Water Management, and Disadvantaged Community Involvement Technical Assistance grant to the Yuba Water Agency. The resources created under that grant provided a foundation for additional collaboration between the authors of this e-book and for further developing conservation finance strategies in project areas across Northern California. Please see the initial report, Because It’s Worth It, and the conservation finance issue briefs for additional complements to this book.

We updated and edited several original articles and added new chapters with additional collaborators to build on this effort. We hope to add new chapters, cases, and success stories as conservation finance evolves.

Conservation Finance¶

Whether in the form of grants or capital budget allocations, public agency funding often fluctuates dramatically with political and financial currents. This long-term unpredictability often motivates businesses, nonprofits, and agencies to seek sustainable funding models and approaches to leverage public and private investments in natural resource conservation and infrastructure.

Conservation finance offers an emerging approach to securing long-term, predictable finance for landscape-scale conservation and forest health projects. Conservation finance also fosters effective collaboration between private and public sectors, creating stakeholders and investors from the pool of project beneficiaries. This innovative strategy achieves multiple goals:

• Channels capital into conservation projects that offer overlapping triple-bottom-line (ecological, social, and financial) outcomes.

• Attracts private investment by quantifying ecosystem services to create a value proposition for beneficiaries, who will pay for these benefits.

• Utilizes partnerships to strengthen the financial foundation for watershed restoration, reforestation, and post-fire recovery.

• Reduces the burden on public budgets and stabilizes irregular funding sources.

• Increases the pace and scale at which these initiatives are implemented.

• Enables the long-term protection of forests and related natural resources, ensuring their invaluable benefits persist for future generations.

Why this book?¶

Some innovative finance strategies and case studies are described across the professional and academic press. However, in many cases, this information is either tailored to an audience with previous finance expertise or is captured in disparate articles that do not provide a single point of reference. Most publications focus on urban water infrastructure, although some well-documented conservation finance cases exist. This web-accessible book is intended to serve as a concise yet comprehensive introduction focused on conservation finance. It is intended for land managers, public agencies, nonprofits, municipalities, and other individuals without specific expertise in project finance.

While other publications and the focus of impact finance focus on social investment and infrastructure, this book focuses on examples and cases of natural resource management, forest health, water infrastructure, and watershed restoration.

Chapters¶

The book contains the following chapters:

1. Primer. A description of conservation finance, including examples and cases.

2. Fire. An analysis of applying conservation finance to forest health and fire mitigation.

3. Water. Examples and cases from water and stormwater management that are instructive for conservation finance.

4. Barriers. The barriers to conservation finance, in particular, getting beyond their challenges to implement conservation finance at scale.

5. Roadmap. A roadmap for moving conservation finance from bespoke pilots to scale.