Environmental justice in land conservation requires practitioners to slow down and consider the foundations that exclude or enable relationships with and control over land. The following stories highlight three organizations using conservation finance strategies to advance environmental justice outcomes. In each story, participants have asked: why is this so?
District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) created an innovative municipal bond that covers the downside risk of using green infrastructure to control stormwater runoff. By offloading risk of green infrastructure to investors, the utility created financing for a new approach- and time to get right. Now other...
New York City's Brooklyn Bridge Park, here on a morning during the Covid shutdown, blends public and private capital to broaden open space access. More neighborhoods need parks like this.
America has a long tradition of creating public parks and open space, from the rugged wilds of our National Parks and National Forests to the pocket park down the road from our homes. Today, in the midst of Covid-19 social distancing, those of us who are fortunate to have access...
The traditional water fund model, which has been used around the world, pools philanthropic and donor capital to support upstream restorations. The Revolving Water Fund innovates on this model by also aiming to quantify the pollution reductions from these restoration activities, then packaging and selling the reductions to municipalities in...
How does Atlanta's Proctor Creek connect to national water management and worldwide carbon mitigation? The same way conversations about small projects connect to global biodiversity breakthroughs. / Shawn Taylor / CC BY 2.0
The city of Atlanta has new funds for green infrastructure. In January 2019, the city — in partnership with impact investing intermediary firm Quantified Ventures — closed a $14 million environmental impact bond (EIB) for stormwater management in the city’s Proctor Creek watershed.
