Conservation Finance Network

Green bond investors, celebrating a landmark step toward establishing market standards, are starting to worry that the next big thing in sustainable finance could undermine those efforts.

Mayor Byron W. Brown announced during his 14th State of the City address that Buffalo will launch the largest environmental impact bond in the country at $30 million. The funds from this investment will allow the City of Buffalo and Buffalo Sewer Authority to capitalize on the Rain Check Buffalo program.

The investment will focus on driving innovation, advancing clean air travel technologies, accelerating reductions in waste and emissions, and establishing new offsetting and natural carbon sequestration projects, the company said.

The new program will offer farmers wheat and oat contracts to deliver grain to Smithfield’s Allerton and Davis City elevators in south-central Iowa, along with a cost-share rate of $25 per acre through Practical Farmers of Iowa to establish a cover crop after oat or wheat harvest.

A new pilot project aims to reward Canadian producers for sequestering carbon in grasslands, highlighting the value of agriculture on these landscapes to the public.

Private equity firm Ecosystem Investment Partners has been helping investors profit off of ecological restoration and conservation projects since 2007. EIP has raised nearly $1 billion from investors through three institutional funds, including $454.5 million for its latest fund, Ecosystem Investment Partners IV.

This grant funding program focuses on helping kick-start innovative and scalable approaches for reducing emissions and storing more carbon on natural and working lands in the United States.

Mainstream green finance initiatives conceptualize environmental funding gaps as examples of market failures. Nature- and climate-related risks are perceived as underpriced in financial markets, resulting in negative externalities borne by society and the natural world.

Economists and scientists agree that carbon taxes help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating an incentive for people to use less fossil fuels. But that’s not all they can do.

"It didn't surprise me that interest in last month's Chesapeake Conservation Finance Intensive course was robust. The event brought together land trust staff and partners from across the watershed with a faculty of national and regional experts to discuss forest carbon offsets, revolving water funds, voluntary surcharges, state revolving funds, pay-for-success outcomes-based contracting and financing and more."