USE CASES
Natural Asset Companies are a versatile vehicle for financing conservation, natural infrastructure, and regenerative agriculture.
NATURAL AREAS
NACs based on natural areas focus on protecting, growing, and restoring natural terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Examples include forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coral reefs.
Natural areas, underpinned by ecological health and biodiversity, are inherently valuable. They also contribute life-supporting services upon which local communities, the global economy, and all of humanity ultimately depend. These include provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and genetic resources; regulating services related to climate, floods, fire, disease, and water quality; and cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits. Protecting these areas will enhance ecosystem integrity, including biodiversity, as well as ecosystem service production.
WORKING AREAS
NACs based on working lands focus on transitioning conventional production systems towards regenerative approaches, which increase the production of ecosystem services.
Regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach to farming and ranching that seeks to restore and enhance soil health, biodiversity, ecosystem function, and supply chain resilience while improving the livelihoods of farmers and communities. NACs can provide the financing and business structure to fuel a scalable shift towards regenerative methods, increase farm profitability, and enable farmers and ranchers to be compensated for production of both commodity crops and ecosystem services. Agriculture is a focus for IEG as it sits at the intersection of critical environmental and social issues — water, energy, climate, human health, the economy, and biodiversity.
HYBRID AREAS
Hybrid NACs focus on areas that comprise nature, working lands, and built infrastructure in a single company.
The objective of a hybrid NAC is to increase ecological performance across multiple land use types. A representative example is a NAC focused on improving the health of a bay that has a watershed which could include agricultural lands, residential neighborhoods, parks, and towns that possess their own natural asset values. All are critical to the bay’s ecological health. Investing in improvements to built infrastructure, such as storm water, sewage, and greenspace systems, would be part of the strategy to improve the bay’s health and ecological productivity.