Conservation Finance - From Niche to Mainstream

Sustainable farmland, healthy forests, clean water, and abundant habitat stand to become more valuable as the global population climbs to nine billion by 2050. Already, pioneering investors have put together financial solutions that combine real assets, such as tropical forests, with cash flows from operations in fields such as sustainable timber, agriculture, and ecotourism. Conservation finance, as this field is known, represents an undeveloped, but emerging private sector investment opportunity of major proportion.

In the attached report, which Credit Suisse developed together with the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, we propose a toolkit for substantially growing the investment that flows into the conservation sector, illustrated by a few concrete ideas that we deem to be scalable, repeatable, and investable. Implementing these ideas will require strong collaboration between the financial and environmental communities to find new and creative ways of solving the financial structuring and conservation challenges at hand.

This report is primarily targeted at mainstream investors (i.e., institutional investors, (U)HNWI, and retail investors) who are interested in learning more about investment structures that provide a market-rate return in a low-yield environment as well as a positive conservation impact.