Conservation Finance Network

CFN is pleased to announce our 17th annual Boot Camp will be held June 5-9, 2023, at the Yale School of the Environment in New Haven, CT, in partnership with the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. The Boot Camp is a week-long intensive workshop that helps mid-career professionals...

Countries and companies are indeed looking to restore forests and other ecosystems to offset carbon output. Nature-based carbon projects protect or restore ecosystems, like a tropical forest in Indonesia, and generate carbon credits based on the emissions avoided or sequestered. Typically, third-party developers put these projects together for implementation by...

Bryan Van Stippen’s talk started with an assertion: Tribal nations must “not let their natural resource assets benefit others before they benefit their own communities.” The National Indian Carbon Coalition (NICC) views carbon projects as both economic development and natural resource stewardship opportunities in response to historic extraction and theft.

States around the nation are changing laws to clarify and speed up financing for natural climate solutions. Now Green Bank CEO Bryan Garcia and his team are looking for a senior team member to crystallize and underwrite the strategy. Garcia says it’d be the first time the green bank has...

In June, conservation finance practitioners reconnected in a stone skyscraper overlooking New York City's Madison Square Park for a key annual conference. This story excerpts a dialogue between Emma Crystal, the bank's chief sustainability officer, and a BlackRock research leader named Chris Weber.

An NGO head working in South America joined the first live Boot Camp we've hosted since 2019. His recollections mix optimism with determination, technique with tenacity, and the spirit of past Boot Camps with the reasons for attending future ones.

Decades of blasting the tops of mountains for coal have clouded generations of human life and millions of years' worth of other life in Appalachia. A new approach that centers on reclaiming mine sites, supporting health in order to build livelihoods, can reset that.

This January, Environmental Defense Fund and Farmers Business Network launched the pilot Regenerative Agriculture Finance Fund (RAFF). Enrolled farmers who meet soil health and nitrogen efficiency standards will access a 0.5% discount on a one-year credit line. This product, years in the making, aims to update farm financing.

In looking at forest restoration finance in a tropical context, three experts at a Yale-sponsored panel spoke of clearer images from space and more inclusive planning on the ground.

District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) created a municipal bond that covers the downside risk of using green infrastructure to control stormwater runoff. By offloading risk to investors, the utility drew new financing -and time to get its practices right. Now other cities are following its lead.