How to pay for healthy ecosystems?

Ecosystem Equity was created to explore sustainable financial incentives for maintenance and restoration of healthy and productive ecosystems, including farmland, fisheries, forests and rangelands.

This work led us to consider how information about value creation, as well as real resources, flow through an economy. We explored how to integrate financial and environmental values, and asked how banks might be reimagined as guardians and builders not only of financial wealth but of natural capital too.

Our chief contribution is "eco-credit"

Eco-credit is a loan that adds an obligation for ecological restoration alongside repayment of principal and interest. The intention is that ecological restoration, as a term of the loan agreement, balances ecological damage caused by the financed activity. The eco-credit approach, and other tools we developed, have been adopted and used by Greenfi.org, the Mkuba Programme, Nature Fundi, the Kwale Eco-Credit Project, Sea Sense, the Cooperative and Rural Development Bank in Tanzania, and Tree Fundi (still under development).

Recognition

Ecosystem Equity's work has been recognised with several awards and prizes, including the United Nations/Morgan Stanley Global Prize for Climate Change Finance Innovation, Climate Policy Initiative's Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, a SwissRe ReSource Prize, a Mastercard Zambezi Innovation Prize, a ClimateKIC Award and a Conservation Finance Alliance Prize.