A key goal of the Environmental Markets and Finance Summit, hosted by Forest Trends and AEMI, was to begin mapping out what a coordinated financial strategy could look like, in order to scale up global restoration and sustainable land use dramatically. Environmental markets (the most prominent of which focus on carbon offsets, wetland and habitat credits, sustainably certified products, and water quality offsets and trading) have matured mostly in silos. It is time to start putting the pieces together and cross-pollinating solutions.

The Green New Deal has been the focal point of the climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates. Less publicized is the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, a proposal from senator and presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, that seeks to frame climate change as a threat to the public markets.

In February 2019, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water issued a memo updating the agency’s water quality trading policy “to promote market-based mechanisms.” The memo includes six principles intended to clarify aspects of the federal water quality trading program, provide tools and incentives to states and local governments to implement trading programs, and promote increased investment in conservation.

A new paper, Sandboxing Nature, suggests taking an approach called a “regulatory sandbox” — a flexible testing ground for new innovations — and applying that to conservation, for faster conservation and restoration outcomes.

The public and private sectors can incentivize sustainable land use and forest conservation. While still only one part of the solution, there are encouraging signs of new efforts to finance sustainable agribusiness.

Recently demand for offsets has risen fast, and could rise faster if federal or state climate legislation created compliance markets for them. Voluntary carbon markets are relatively small, and voluntary carbon offsets cut less than two tenths of a percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions — but in a larger compliance market, where offsets help meet climate policy requirements, they could cut orders of magnitude more.

The Environmental Protection Agency is offering $14 million to fund projects that help reduce harmful runoff into Great Lakes waterways through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That includes green infrastructure, farmer-led outreach and education, manure management on farms, and a market-based approach called “water quality trading.”

After seven years of drought in California that drained aquifers and brought many farmers to the brink, legislators in Sacramento crafted a bunch of rules governing water usage. Those rules, many of which kick in next year, cap how much water farmers and cities can use.

Land restoration could attract large private investments in the fight against climate change over the coming decades, if governments and the United Nations put the right incentives and conditions in place.