Landscape Finance
Landscape finance is an emerging industry, but its potential to scale up natural capital based investments is huge.
Investors and businesses are increasingly seeing the value of mechanisms that can provide a range of social and environmental returns in addition to commercial profit. Landscapes offer this at scale.
African farmer ©Annie Spratt, Unsplash
What makes landscape finance different to other types of green investment?
Investment in Nature based Solutions (NbS) has grown in recent years, but still has a limited track record. Few NbS projects are truly commercial and most are relatively small-scale. Landscape-scale finance offers a way to address these shortcomings. Landscapes group and aggregate activities to achieve larger impact and synergies. Blending public, private and philanthropic sources of finance allows for investment across different types of activities and at different stages of development. Public and philanthropic funds, for instance, can support more accurate measurement systems while loans and equity are more relevant for business activities.
Landscapes also allow for integration with subnational and national policy and administrations.
A few examples of the Lab's support for financial mechanisms investing into landscapes
Dutch Fund for Climate and Development
This €160M fund invests across landscapes and NbS projects in the tropics. The Lab helped design the landscape methodology and train landscape teams until 2021.
Landscape Resilience Fund
This fund was initiated by the Lab with WWF and South Pole and is now operating with a focus on NbS investments for adaptation.
Matanataki Development Facility
this impact-focused vehicle invests in business solutions to protect the Great Sea Reef of Fiji. The Lab assisted its establishment, and Matanataki ownership was later localised in 2021.