Conservation Finance

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits governments to mobilising $200 billion a year by 2030 from all sources. With constrained public budgets and overseas aid shrinking, progress is going the wrong way, and a rising share of the funding required to meet 30x30 targets will have to come from private capital.

Finance instruments are proliferating: green and blue bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, parametric insurance, biodiversity credits, outcome-based payments, to name just a few. Capital is increasingly willing. What remains scarce is the pipeline of projects structured well enough to receive it.

We work on that side of the problem, helping protected areas, NGOs, governments and funders value their natural assets and ecosystem services, identify associated beneficiaries and revenue streams, and build financial strategies that hold up to scrutiny.

  • We identify where finance delivers most, combining ecological and ecosystem service values, threats, costs and feasibility to help funders allocate across candidate sites or assemble a portfolio.

  • We quantify and value what a conservation investment protects or generates, through evaluation of ecosystem services and associated stakeholder beneficiaries, in the terms funders, finance ministries and investment committees use.

  • We screen the numerous potential finance instruments against the context, and test whether the conditions each one depends on are in place.

  • We cost the management baseline, map current and potential revenue, and set out a sequenced plan to close the gap.

  • We define what success looks like, set indicators that can be measured and audited, and assess the results. Increasingly required where disbursement or repayment is linked to outcomes.

Why choose Sustain Value?

Conservation finance fails more often on evidence than on appetite. Showing that a benefit stream is real, quantified and attributable to the investment is a valuation problem, and nature valuation is what we have done for 15 years. We bring that to financing work for clients including Re:wild, WCS, WWF, the Asian Development Bank and ORRAA, combining rigorous environmental economics with practical knowledge of how these mechanisms work in the places they are applied.