Funders / Investors
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Marco, ESG lead for large company
“My company is developing its approach to natural capital assets and has asked me to explore the potential for the development of a £50m portfolio. I’m interested in how we can use our own resources to improve our environmental bottom line.”
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Jenny, family office investment manager
“My clients are looking at diversifying their portfolio into more sustainable assets, offering longer term returns and benefiting their country’s environment. They have heard a lot about green finance and natural capital, but they are nervous about ‘greenwashing’.”
Are you a finance professional seeking more information on opportunities in forest restoration in Europe? Whether you work with companies, funds, high net worth individuals, philanthropy, pensions or insurance, you’re in the right place. Explore our example user profiles to get a better idea of whom this page is meant for and uncover key enablers and barriers for financing forest restoration that are especially relevant for your work.
Introduction
The work needed to restore and adapt ecosystems and habitats has been mostly paid from public finance to date. Furthermore, many landowners have made an impressive effort in restoring, adapting and managing their forest in a multifunctional way with limited or no extra funding, and by investing their own time. However, given the scale of the restoration demand and thus of investment needed, while seeing many other pressures on public finances, the importance of encouraging and enabling greater private finance is increasingly understood. But numerous barriers and enablers of sustainable financing to scale up forest biodiversity restoration exist, which is revealed through data-driven analysis combined with real-world insights obtained from a wide range of stakeholders at many levels.
This Funders/Investors journey provides you with practical guidance on how to improve investment in forest restoration, ensuring effective and impactful financial strategies. As someone involved in sustainable finance, you can become a key enabler for improving the health, resilience and biodiversity of Europe’s forests on a large-scale. While you understand the complex landscape of markets and investment, we offer more insights into the risks and opportunities associated with improving forests’ ecological condition. You can also obtain a better understanding of the fundamental principles of restoration in order to determine value, as well as of the future potential and risks associated with specific restoration actions or different geographies.
1. Restoration Concepts and Approaches
Restoration is the process of actively or passively assisting the recovery of an ecosystem in order to improve its structure and functions, with the aim of conserving or enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. Restoration means different things to different stakeholder groups – some may focus on the processes, others on the outcomes. In policy work it is extremely important to ensure a shared understanding (or at least recognise the different understandings) before engaging in the subject. In these pages we highlight useful material covering restoration concepts, the underlying need for restoration – forest degradation, and the range of different approaches taken to restoration in Europe.
4. Managing Risks
Recent years have seen a sharp change in public dialogues about corporate and private investment in nature and climate solutions. Accusations of ‘green-washing’ (overstatement of the impact of investments in nature), and the erosion of global political consensus on climate change have led to a slowing of momentum in global nature investment and the emergence of ‘green-hushing’ - where engagement in nature markets is under-emphasised or hidden. Here we explore approaches to mitigate the risks of green-washing.
