Conservation Finance
Finding new ways to fund critical restoration work on National Forests
National Forests provide valuable goods and services, like clean water, healthy watersheds, and recreation-based economies. Our Conservation Finance Program explores opportunities to quantify and value these goods and services to spur investment from individuals, businesses, or local governments that want to maintain or improve the delivery of specific services.
Conservation Finance both increases the amount of funding available for projects and uses finance mechanisms to change the timing of funding to accelerate restoration. The program currently focuses on two primary areas of work: environmental markets and fund aggregation.
Environmental Markets
Wetland Credits
When new development affects existing wetlands, developers are often required to buy wetland mitigation credits to offset their impacts. In fall 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the NFF’s In-Lieu Fee Program for compensatory wetland mitigation.
This first-of-its-kind program, developed specifically for operation on National Forests, provides an innovative way to fund the restoration of streams and wetlands on National Forest lands in western Colorado through the sale of formally regulated wetland and stream credits.
Water Benefits Program
The Water Benefits Program at NFF utilizes ecosystem service quantification science and tools to evaluate the impact of NFF’s restoration efforts. The program focuses on water replenishment metrics analysis to attract financial contributions from voluntary water benefit claims markets, catalyzing new, creative sources of funding for our projects and enabling the NFF to further leverage other support provided from grants, corporate donations, and individual giving.
The Water Benefits Program helps us to better understand the positive effect of our work and brings critical resources to important activities taking place across the country, from wildfire risk reduction projects in California, to watershed health projects in the Colorado River Basin, to grassland restoration projects in Texas, and beyond.
Fund Aggregation
Fund Aggregation is the collection of funding from multiple sources to complete large-scale projects. This approach is useful when projects can benefit numerous entities, and each entity is willing to support a portion of the total cost.
The Forest Resilience Bond (FRB) that Blue Forest developed and the NFF is implementing on the Tahoe National Forest is an excellent example of fund aggregation. The FRB combines funding from the State of California, Yuba Water Agency, U.S. Forest Service, and the NFF to complete forest restoration projects. In this case, the FRB also helps accelerate the pace and scale of restoration by using upfront financing to complete the project faster than would otherwise be possible.
Another example of fund aggregation includes the Northern Arizona Forest Fund, a watershed investment partnership developed by the NFF that has raised more than $5 million from dozens of funders to support restoration of the forests surrounding northern Arizona communities and the watersheds that supply surface water to the greater Phoenix area.
Our Forests Need Us Today.
Your donation powers critical, on-the-ground conservation—from wildfire recovery to watershed restoration—protecting forests for the future.
