Our conservation finance approach brings together stakeholders and funding sources to accelerate the pace and scale of forest and ecosystem management — tackling the cost of restoration now and avoiding the much greater cost of inaction. The Forest Resilience Bond achieves this by bringing together entities that benefit from restoration and a resilient landscape to share the cost of reimbursing investors as the benefits of project activities are realized.
We partner with communities, land owners, governments, and nonprofits to design conservation finance projects that improve forest and watershed health. This includes:
- Community collaboration: We lead by listening to local priorities. Our facilitation process strives to strengthen collaboration by aligning diverse perspectives, build upon local expertise, and develop structures that break down historic barriers to participation.
- On-the-Ground Implementation Strategy: We partner with landowner(s) and on the ground implementation partner(s) to identify strategies to scale implementation, allowing more acres of restoration and individual project actions to be completed each year.
- Capacity Building: We facilitate resilience bond development through project management, strategic planning, and training opportunities to build local conservation finance and landscape scale implementation capacity.
- Ecosystem Services and Benefit Evaluation: We partner with local researchers and the World Resources Institute (WRI) to develop project- and beneficiary-specific environmental and economic assessments. See more of our science work here.
- Beneficiary Engagement: We assess the funding landscape, map project outcomes to beneficiaries, engage beneficiaries, and weave together funding from multiple partners to make a project pencil out.
- Conservation Finance Structuring: We develop financial models, construct contracts, and design financial structures to maximize the impact of forest and ecosystem restoration.
The FRB Catalyst Facility
The FRB Catalyst Facility (the Facility) is a pooled investment vehicle that finances high-impact ecological restoration projects with revolving loans. The Facility’s revolving structure is tailored to the seasonal financing profiles of Forest Resilience Bonds and allows Blue Forest to finance multiple projects simultaneously while also cycling funds into new projects over time. With a robust pipeline of potential projects, the Facility will offer Blue Forest an unprecedented opportunity to scale impact.
How it works:
The FRB Catalyst Facility is targeting investments in at least 10 FRB projects in new, high-priority geographies and communities across the Western US. The majority of these projects will finance forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction on public lands, with others targeting additional restoration activities including post-fire recovery and integrated landscape and watershed resilience projects across public and private lands.
Broadly, each FRB will finance a planned and permitted restoration project that is designed to maximize its positive impact on the surrounding landscape. Blue Forest provides financing to implement these projects, which are entirely planned by the land manager and implementation partner. Blue Forest projects that the Facility has the potential to directly restore at least 50,000 acres and protect (reduce fire risk on) at least 100,000 acres.
Alongside a financial return, the Facility is expected to deliver numerous environmental, economic, and social benefits, including: advancing community- and place-based conservation priorities such as climate resilience, reduced wildfire risk, sustainable rural development, healthy watersheds, and biodiversity conservation.
Other Resilience Bonds and Financing
Climate change and urban development are increasing the frequency of severe weather events, threatening species, and degrading ecosystems. For example, a high density of roads, removal of beavers, and invasive species have resulted in watersheds with increased risk of flooding, barriers to fish migration, and degraded water quality. Blue Forest and partners are exploring how resilience bonds and other conservation finance tools can support salmon health, coastal ecosystems, urban forestry, private land conservation, and more.
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