This paper reviews the investment models and innovations emerging from the field of integrated landscape investing, which is developing quickly to meet the financing needs of landscape projects as well as the demand from investors for bankable landscape projects. Both small and large financial actors are looking for business models that allow them to contribute to social and ecological outcomes while also generating financial returns. These efforts are being supported by emerging policy frameworks at national and international levels such as the Green Deal for Nature and the UN Decade of Landscape Restoration. While more work needs to be done to fully understand the extent of these models and how they function, the report highlights some initial conclusions:

Major emerging opportunities

Integrated landscape finance vehicles can supercharge efforts to fund landscape investment portfolios. Multiple sources of funding are needed to finance a given landscape’s portfolio of investments. A single investment vehicle cannot fund the full, diverse portfolio of potential investments. But integrated investment vehicles can play a critical role in channeling and aggregating sources of finance that the landscape may not otherwise be able to access. Given the vehicles’ support for landscape objectives, they are more likely to take on the additional risk of investing in activities they see as critical to overall landscape success. The existence of dedicated finance vehicles can motivate project and business developers to focus on important project ideas that might otherwise be discarded on the assumption that no financing would be available. Flows of funding from these vehicles should reduce the risk or increase the profitability of many other aligned investments.

There are promising opportunities to integrate sustainable agriculture and natural resource management concerns into development finance institutions. Some of the most promising existing models for community-focused, multiobjective finance coordination currently come from place-based efforts outside the land-use sector, particularly in urban development. Efforts should be made to more systematically include regenerative agriculture, forestry and fisheries, natural infrastructure, and other common landscape investments into these existing institutions.

Landscape-scale investment opportunities are emerging for large institutional investors. Much of the innovation in this space began with smallerscale projects. However, as demand from large institutional investors for sustainability and placebased-focused investments has grown, designers of investment vehicles have developed creative models that, in theory, could service large-scale institutional investors. Examples include the IFC’s Forest Bond, OpenInvest’s place-based offerings, and the still conceptual Bay Area Impact Investing Initiative. Opportunities are growing to leverage climate finance for integrated landscape investment. There are promising opportunities to mobilize terrestrial carbon finance to fund whole landscape portfolios, as demonstrated by the Althelia Climate Fund’s Tambopata-Bahuaja project.

These observations are encouraging, however landscape investment models have not yet generated a strong track record of largescale success. The report proposes four strands of work to address those gaps, related to design research, financial systems innovation, policy, and capacity strengthening for landscape partnerships and other actors.