News focused exclusively on financing
environmental conservation
We are pleased to share our March newsletter with you. It has been a busy few weeks for us as we followed up after the launch of the Conservation Finance Practitioner (CFP) Roundtable and prepared to announce the 2016 Conservation Finance Network Boot Camp at Duke and the new Program Associate position.
We’ve also got some great news lined up this month – including a video interview with Tom Lovejoy, coverage of the Net Impact conference session “Conservation Finance: Investing in Nature at Scale,” and a recap of the CFP Roundtable kickoff.    
Please help us to share the announcements for the Boot Camp and Program Associate position and be sure to check out this month’s original content and coverage of the field. 

Announcements

Join Us for the Conservation Finance Network Boot Camp
The Conservation Finance Network’s 2016 Boot Camp training course is being held in partnership with the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University from June 6 to 10. Now in its 10th year, this intensive week-long course is geared to help professionals use innovative and effective financing strategies for land resource conservation, restoration and stewardship.
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Conservation Finance Practitioner Roundtable Launches
A new forum has emerged for discussing key issues in the rapidly growing and evolving conservation finance field: the Conservation Finance Practitioner Roundtable. The group met for the first time on Jan. 20 at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.
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Share Our Job Opportunity
Conservation Finance Network is hiring a full-time Program Associate to assist with all aspects of the program including training activities, cross‐sector convenings, strategic communication, and expanded fundraising. The Program Associate will work closely with the Program Director and CFN Advisory Board to strengthen CFN’s overall mission. For more information, the full job description is available here.
To apply, please send a cover letter and résumé to resumes@islandpress.org with the subject line, “Program Associate‐60.16C.” The deadline for applications is Friday, April 1.

Features

Net Impact 2015 Explores the Growth of Conservation Finance
If the Net Impact 2015 session "Conservation Finance: Investing in Nature at Scale" was any indication, conservation finance is now in the thoughts of investors, business-school students, and change makers around the world. The conference, which took place in Seattle in Nov. 5-7, explored a wide range of up-and-coming social-impact topics.
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Video: An Interview with Tom Lovejoy, "Godfather of Biodiversity" 
Chris Martin, student program manager at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, interviewed Tom Lovejoy, who is known as “the godfather of biodiversity." He is unquestionably among the world's most prominent figures in environmental conservation.
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News

Obama Looks to Increase Budget for Public Lands
President Obama is proposing to fully fund a key federal conservation program in 2017 and pump funding into the National Park Service to recognize its centennial this year. Obama’s budget provides $900 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) in 2017, making the program permanent and shifting some of its funding to mandatory accounts, the White House said on Tuesday.
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$20 Million Committed to Innovative Conservation Projects
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the availability of up to $20 million in competitive grants through the Conservation Innovation Grants program. The program aims to spark the development and adoption of cutting-edge conservation technologies and approaches for farmers, ranchers, and other landowners.
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United States Feds to Launch Special Category of Mitigation Credits for Farmers
Cash-strapped farmers and ranchers say they can’t compete with industry for mitigation credits, and the United States Department of Agriculture seems to agree. As part of its new Wetland Mitigation Banking Program, the USDA is distributing $9 million to state governments, NGOs, private firms, and other parties interested in developing banks and banking systems specifically for agricultural producers.
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Guiding the Green Bond Market toward Big Climate Impacts
The green bond market experienced an extremely good year in 2014, with bonds issued at a three times larger scale than the previous year. Also in 2014, four financial institutions established the Green Bond Principles to maintain some order, though voluntary, preventing flurries of poorly structured green bonds from flooding this fast-growing piece of the climate-finance realm.
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When Poor People Pay the Price for Forest Conservation
Research published this week in the journal Global Environmental Change reveals a tough but critical issue for REDD+ conservation schemes to grapple with. Sometimes, the research shows, the social safeguards included to ensure that vulnerable forest communities are not further marginalized by conservation programs fail to actually benefit the people they are designed to help.
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Earth Genome Aims to Make Natural Capital as Ubiquitous as Financial Capital
Earth Genome, along with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, scientists at institutions such as Arizona State University, and a group of seven pilot companies, has embarked on a quest to demystify the nexus between environmental data and financial value — a field broadly referred to as natural capital. Earth Genome's new GIST tool generates contextual financial information on various solutions, such as how long it will take to see payback on a given green-infrastructure project.
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Forests, Farms, And Fields Absorb 15% of US Carbon Emissions, But Face an Uncertain Future. Here’s How to Save Them.
The forests, farms and fields of the United States sponge up roughly 15 percent of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, but that carbon sink is under threat as forests age, urban areas expand, and the climate changes. A new study says carbon finance, green bonds, and a dash of policy coordination can help ensure a robust sink for years to come.
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Lack of Land Rights for Local Communities Could Scare Away Investment
Research has shown that land held by indigenous and local communities tends to be more effectively protected from human-driven changes like deforestation than land managed by governments or private entities. However, these communities lack rights to nearly 75 percent of their global lands. Not only is this deficit putting wildlife habitat at risk, researchers say, it also is stymying the fight against poverty, hunger, and climate change.
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Climate Change Reshapes Infrastructure Investing Frontier
The legally binding global agreement to reduce emissions, combined with climate change’s move into first place as a World Economic Forum risk to society and explosive growth in green bonds are among the clear signals to investors that infrastructure investments must increasingly be low-carbon, says a longtime financial journalist.
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Reports

Nature Doesn’t Pay My Bills: Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understandings of Urban Nature and Health
This report is the first step in a larger collaboration with the TKF Foundation to develop a set of communications strategies and tools that can elevate public and policymaker support for making experiences of nature readily accessible to all residents of America’s cities.
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What’s Nature Worth? Study Puts a Price on Groundwater and Other Natural Capital
Most people understand that investing in the future is important. That goes for conserving nature and natural resources, too. But in the case of investing in such “natural” assets as groundwater, forests, and fish populations, it can be challenging to measure the return on that investment.
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Commentary

3 Ways the Marketplace Could End Amazon Deforestation
There was a lot of talk about deforestation at the latest round of international climate talks in December 2015, and it’s no mystery why: Tropical deforestation and forest degradation account for as much as 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions today.
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Disrupting Biodiversity Markets at the Request of President Obama?
On Nov. 3, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum calling for environmental markets to develop large-scale solutions that lead to a net benefit for the environment. Environmental markets pay landowners to provide ecosystem services such as water purification and retention, species habitat, or carbon sequestration to name the most common.
Read more...

Events

Investing for Impact
March 24
San Francisco, CA
CFN Boot Camp Course
Duke Nicholas School of the Environment
June 6-10
Durham, NC 
SOCAP16
Sept. 13-16
San Francisco, CA
Land Trust Rally (Call for Proposals)
Oct. 18-30
Minneapolis, MN
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