Conservation Finance Network

This webinar will ask: what sort of finance is needed to support a move to a regenerative agriculture system that makes food production a net positive?. It will draw on over a year’s worth of discussions and explore new questions.

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The practice of raising and managing capital to support land, water, and natural resource conservation.

Network, in partnership with the Yale Center for Business and Environment and Highstead, is pleased to host the Conservation Finance Virtual Boot Camp July 13 – July 15, 2021. This Virtual Boot Camp will explore the latest trends and strategies in funding and financing being put to work for land and natural resource conservation, restoration, and stewardship. With an emphasis on hands-on tools and lessons from relevant case studies, we will explore innovative and overlooked opportunities. Recordings of the webinars will be publicly available on our website at a later date. Registration Fee: $60 This fee will help us continue to grow our programming. If the ticket price is cost-prohibitive for your attendance, please contact Helen Rogers. Agenda Day 1 – Tuesday, July 13th Session 1: The Evolution and Next Era of Conservation Funding & Financing [2:00 - 3:00 pm ET ] What exactly is conservation finance? Which approaches are well established, and what does emerging activity and innovation entail? This session will provide an overview of how conservation finance approaches have evolved, exploring current trends and a range of funding and financing strategies being put to work for land and resource conservation, restoration, and stewardship. Moderator...

In this webinar, we will hear about two water fund models that differ in both the types of watersheds that they seek to protect and the types of finance they seek to leverage. We will then discuss the lessons learned from each model and compare their potential for scale and replication in different types of geographic settings. Ashley Allen Jones (i2 Capital) will present her work with the Revolving Water Fund, an innovative conservation finance model that aligns the interests of farmers, conservationists, municipalities, regulators and impact investors to address conservation on a watershed scale. The model, piloted in the Brandywine-Christina Watershed in Pennsylvania and Delaware, invests in structural agricultural BMPs in partnership with farmers and conservation organizations, and then transfers such reductions to municipal entities and water companies as a mechanism for water quality compliance. In so doing, the Revolving Water Fund creates a sustained pool of capital to fund priority agriculture-based pollution reduction strategies. Spencer Meyer (Highstead Foundation, Sebago Clean Waters Initiative) will introduce the Sebago Clean Waters initiative, a conservation collaborative and water fund serving the Greater Portland, Maine region in an effort to secure permanently the forests that naturally filter the drinking water for 1/6th of...