Co-Investing in Nature works with funders, finance vehicles, intermediaries and landscape organizations to solve difficult funding and finance problems around nature outcomes.
The work starts with what already exists—institutions, strategies, public funding, philanthropy, environmental markets, beneficiaries and finance—and asks what additional resources, capabilities or connections would make the greatest difference.
Healthy ecosystems generate many forms of value, often at landscape scale. Their condition reflects the work of governments, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, land managers, companies, implementers, funders and others over time.
Yet each contributor still needs something specific it can assess, approve, support and explain.
Co-investing makes those discrete contributions possible without pretending that any one contribution independently produces or owns the wider outcome.
Much of this already happens across nature finance. Donors support enabling conditions and public goods. Governments fund stewardship and public programs. Beneficiaries pay for ecosystem services. Companies contribute to climate and nature goals. Finance vehicles, environmental markets and intermediaries connect different forms of capital to implementation.
But these practices are fragmented across mechanisms and institutions. They do not yet have a widely shared language, visible body of practice, or coherent operating infrastructure that makes it easy for funders to see what works, participate confidently, and build on prior innovation.
Co-Investing in Nature seeks to make that practice more explicit and usable: strengthen what is already working, identify consequential gaps, connect complementary contributors, and use the funding or finance mechanism that fits the problem.
Over time, the goal is to make effective co-investment easier to recognize, adapt and repeat—without standardizing the landscapes, institutions or governance arrangements that should remain context-specific.
Co-investment becomes much more practical when contributors have a common way to fund, orient around outcomes, and account for their role.
Not every funder needs to buy a credit, receive a financial return, or own an attributable share of the outcome. Some funders primarily want the landscape outcome itself: a healthier watershed, more resilient forest, stronger territorial stewardship, restored habitat, or other environmental and social result.
Contribution capital is non-return-seeking funding provided with the explicit intent to help achieve shared environmental and social outcomes, without acquiring exclusive ownership of an environmental credit, unit, or proportionate share of the wider result.
That intent changes how the funding can work. A contribution-capital provider accepts that landscape outcomes are collectively produced and that its funding will operate alongside the actions and resources of others. It can therefore tolerate more uncertainty, share influence, fund enabling or adaptive needs, and support what the wider strategy requires rather than restricting support to a separately attributable result.
Making that intent explicit also makes cooperation easier. Contributors can operate within a shared framework for strategy, evidence, governance, and claims while retaining different motivations and funding channels. They can combine or coordinate funding without pretending that every dollar purchases a discrete environmental outcome.
The result is rigorous funding without requiring ownership of the result—and greater flexibility to fund what the landscape actually needs.
Different contributors may care about climate, water, biodiversity, resilience or livelihoods, but often depend on the same underlying natural system and much of the same management agenda. A shared view of the natural capital, its condition, governance and management creates a basis for alignment without requiring everyone to use one metric or value nature in the same way.
Funders need to be able to explain what their money accomplished. Contribution claims provide recognition without pretending that one contributor owns a share of a collectively produced outcome. Contributors can document what they funded, what was implemented, and how it contributed to wider results, with more specialized measurement added where stronger claims require it.
Together, these make cooperation easier: contributors can support different parts of a shared strategy, use evidence in common where useful, retain distinct objectives and claims, and join existing efforts without forcing the whole system into a single financial instrument or methodology.
Co-investment is particularly promising where different actors genuinely want the same natural system to function, even when they value different benefits.
Public funders and host governments may invest because functioning ecosystems support water security, livelihoods, resilience, infrastructure, agricultural productivity and other public objectives.
Direct beneficiaries—including utilities, cities, agricultural companies and other businesses—may contribute because they depend on watershed health, resilient supply landscapes, fire-risk reduction, coastal protection or other ecosystem services.
Donors and philanthropies can support public goods, stewardship, institutions, evidence, experimentation and other essential functions that do not readily generate financial returns.
Corporate responsibility holders can provide contribution funding when they seek credible climate or nature outcomes without acquiring exclusive ownership of an environmental unit. SBTi's Ongoing Emissions Responsibility framework is one emerging pathway for this kind of corporate climate contribution.
These contributors do not need the same motivation. They may still converge on much of the same management agenda: protecting or restoring natural capital, strengthening legitimate institutions, improving stewardship, supporting producers, building evidence systems or sustaining implementation.
That alignment creates opportunities for better cooperation among funders—shared analysis, complementary roles, common evidence and funding arrangements that allow different contributors to support the same wider strategy.
Not every initiative needs multiple funders. Where one mechanism can efficiently support what is needed, additional complexity adds little value. Co-investment is most useful where value and responsibility are distributed and different contributors are suited to different parts of the strategy.
The practical challenge is turning that potential alignment into credible, fundable opportunities.
