Zach, welcome.
Tell me about the work that you're doing at Blue Forest.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Blue Forest is a nonprofit conservation finance
organization.
So we work with people, science and finance to restore
landscapes and protect communities from things like
catastrophic wildfire.
We were founded in 2015, and we've been restoring landscapes
really ever since.
We do all this through our primary product, which is the
Forest Resilience Bond. And this is a public-private partnership
that we built with the US Forest Service, the World Resources
Institute and the National Forest Foundation. And its
purpose- built: to finance the implementation of nature based
solutions on our public lands.
How have you seen that grow, and
Where else are you identifying opportunities?
Yeah, well I'd love to tell you a little bit of how it works as
well.
So once a project has been planned and there's community
support, we actually bring in financing from institutional
investors such as insurance companies, impact investors,
even foundations to cover the upfront cost of doing this work.
And then we allow all the groups that benefit from that to pay
that back overtime based on the benefit that they receive.
And that could include the US Forest Service, state agencies,
water and electric utilities and even corporates in certain
cases. Partnerships sound vital.
They really are.
We can't get to landscape-scale work without building social
license in these communities.
So what we do is in partnering with the local forest units or a
local NGO or a native nation, really gives us a 360 view of
what this project entails and what the best financing solution
for that might be.
And it makes more durable work for us.
As that work grows, it's less risky for us, as well, to expand
our work and really get at reducing that wildfire risk.
Where are you identifying the biggest finance opportunities in
conservation over the next 5, 10 years?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think the first thing is we've only scratched the surface
on the applied science to really understand the benefits of this
work.
So I imagine this type of financing model could be used in
a lot of different landscape restoration programs as we
better understand all the benefits of of a restored
landscape.
We've also launched a new asset management business, which is
really exciting from my perspective.
And what that was built from was the idea that the system that
we're working in, it's not working the way that we'd like
it to.
There's not enough contractors, there's not enough equipment,
there's not enough infrastructure to sort of handle
the pace and scale of this work right now.
So actually in partnership with an insurance company, CSAA, they
are AAA's northern California affiliate, we launched both Blue
Forest Asset Management and our first strategy to California
Wildfire Innovation Fund that is really investing from the
harvesting and the hauling of this material to the processing
and the utilization focus on community scale efforts and
getting us better carbon outcomes, better economic
outcomes from doing some of this really important forestry work.
Zach, thank you so much.
Thank you.