It’s about shifting the trajectory of economic development toward inclusive green growth, and landscapes are where that starts.
Sara Scherr opened the Landscape Finance plenary at the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn with these words. She introduced the concept of Landscape Investment Portfolios: the full set of projects/businesses and their associated capital requirements identified by a landscape initiative to achieve landscape-scale regeneration. But finding the capital to meet those requirements remains a major challenge.
EcoAgriculture Partners has been working, through our co-leadership of the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation’s Landscape and Seascape Working Group, on an assessment of landscape investment innovations that seeks to highlight what’s happening and identify the gaps and opportunities for scaling out and up to meet that challenge.
Two major categories of innovation: landscape investment vehicles and landscape investment support services
Landscape partnerships need help developing landscape investment portfolios (complete with synergistic projects with responsible/talented operators and a long-term strategy), and they need help strengthening the individual business models or project designs, producing trustworthy financial data, connecting with sources of capital, and negotiating fair and useful financing arrangements. Organizations like EcoAgriculture Partners, CommonLand, the Landscape Finance Lab, IUCN Netherlands, Tropenbos International, IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative, BirdLife International, and an increasing number of others, both non-profit and for-profit, are steadily improving the quality and reach of these support services. Bryna Griffin of Birdlife and Bastiaan Louman of Tropenbos discussed efforts their organizations are making in this regard.
On the other hand, typical investment vehicles and financial products are not designed to address the specific needs of landscape investment portfolios and their unique projects and business models. So innovation by financial institutions and investors is critical to a transformation to inclusive green growth. With that in mind, the panel included Eva Mayerhofer of the European Investment Bank and Hector Martinez, founder of Loom Capital Mesoamerican Landscape Regeneration Fund, representing two sides of the investor spectrum that are each working to develop new vehicles specifically to deploy capital for landscape-scale regeneration.