​Additional Sessions

​At its core, every afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) project solves the same economic problem: nature doesn't generate a return profile that capital markets can price on its own. Carbon sequestration happens over decades, biological risk doesn't map cleanly onto conventional underwriting, and MRV uncertainty makes cash flows hard to model with confidence. Blended finance exists to solve exactly this problem — combining public or concessional capital with private capital to construct a return profile that markets can actually underwrite, so that nature itself can be assigned a dAt its core, every afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) project is solving the same economic problem: nature doesn't generate a return profile that capital markets know how to price on its own. Carbon sequestration happens over decades, biological risk doesn't map cleanly onto conventional underwriting, and MRV uncertainty makes cash flows hard to model with confidence. Blended finance exists to solve exactly this problem — combining public or concessional capital with private capital to construct a return profile that markets can actually underwrite, so that nature itself can be assigned a durable, investable value.

​ACRE Investment Management's GreenTrees project, now the world's largest ACR-registered ARR project, solved this problem at its inception by blending USDA payments (i.e., Conservation Reserve Program) with landowner economics and carbon revenue, at a time when carbon markets were themselves nascent and unproven as a financing tool. That structure has scaled successfully across thousands of enrolled acres and multiple credit vintages, and offers a real-world case study in how blended capital stacks get built from first principles.

​This panel brings together the people who lived through that process and those studying it. The through-line is not a template for exact replication but a shared discipline: identifying what a market needs to see to price nature and building the capital structure that delivers it.

​The Natural Capital Investment Summit

​Nature-based solutions have moved from environmental afterthought to investment thesis — but the market building around them is still being defined in real time. Capital gaps remain in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, institutional investors are asking harder questions about durability and integrity, and the standards meant to underpin trust are evolving as fast as the deals themselves.

This isn't a forum about why nature matters — that conversation is over. It's a forum about how capital, technology, and standards come together to finance nature's restoration at the scale the moment demands. Held during Climate Week NYC, it's built for investors, developers, and policymakers ready to move from commitment to deployment.