Company News

Bay Bank Fast Company Article!

Wednesday, 19 October 2011 17:26

First Wired magazine, now Fast Company!

We're big fans of Fast Company Magazine and were happy to see the article on the Bay Bank!!

The more press we get on Ecosystem Markets, the faster they will become an everyday reality.

We're committed to providing our clients with the expertise in ecosystem market design and development to help make that happen.

"Fast Company profiles progressive business leaders who use innovation, technology, design, and sustainability to make positive changes for the future. By focusing on true innovators who believe in the power of business to solve world problems, Fast Company attracts a nimble, open-minded, and future-focused audience of business leaders"

LandServer Presentation to the Conservation Finance Alliance

Wednesday, 15 June 2011 14:39

The Innovative Finance Mechanisms Working Group is a subset of the Conservation Finance Alliance.

I was invited to present to the group by the IFMWG Chair, Josh Donolan (Kinship 2008) on the work we are doing on LandServer.

You can read the CFA newletter article on LandServer by clicking here, and view the webinar by clicking here.

Kinship Conservation Fellows Update

Thursday, 28 April 2011 10:52

I was honored to be part of the lead story in Kinship Conservations Fellows Spring 2011 newsletter.  The newsletter highlights our LandServer work in the Chesapeake.  While its great to see our work in print, its also really inspiring to read about all of the great work the other Kinship fellows are doing around the globe.  Kinship truly is a global  network of conservation leaders!

Sustainable Solutions gets written up in Wired Magazine!

Wednesday, 13 October 2010 14:58

The new green economyBy Hillary Rosner | 10 September 2010

Want to save nature? Put a price on it. A new green approach is to put a market value on ecosystems -- and preserve the planet along the way

Stretching across parts of Virginia and North Carolina on the east coast of the US, the Great Dismal Swamp is a ghost of landscapes past. In 1763, George Washington led a group of investors who formed the Great Dismal Swamp Company, which felled trees, drained sections of the marsh and turned it into farms. A century later, during the build-up to the Civil War, remaining portions served as part of the Underground Railroad, providing hideouts for escaped slaves.

During the 20th century, more of it was logged, drained and carved by roads. In 1974, the federal government declared the last 45,000 hectares a national wildlife refuge, restoring a swath of it to wetlands.

Today, viewed via Google Earth, the Great Dismal is a jagged oval of dense forest, an unbroken sea of dark green -- save for a lake at the centre and a little chunk of light-green farmland perched on the eastern edge that makes it look as if someone took a bite out of the foliage. For decades, the US government and environmental groups, such as the Nature Conservancy, had been eyeing that missing piece of swamp. But the farmers’ will to sell and the buyers’ ability to raise cash never coincided. Finally, three years ago, the owners of Dover Farms -- one of two farms on the former swampland -- told the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that administers the nature preserve, that they were ready to do a deal. Needing to act quickly, government officials turned to Nick Dilks.

Dilks, who had spent a decade working for the Conservation Fund -- a non-profit that buys and preserves land for government agencies and green groups -- had become fed up with the constant scramble for money. “It got me and others thinking, could we find another source of capital to do those deals without stealing from the same pot?” he says. “So we began thinking about the for-profit sector.” Dilks, along with business partner Fred Danforth, founded Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP) in 2006, with a mission to raise an initial round of $150 million, beginning with small pools of money that would be used for demonstration projects. Instead of soliciting donations, the company offered a chance to invest while helping protect nature.

It’s an approach that’s spreading throughout the environmental world after years of resistance: by some accounts, turning nature into a sound investment represents the last hope of saving it. Humanity’s survival depends on healthy ecosystems -- for freshwater, fertile soil, flood protection and climate control. Scientists call these benefits “ecosystem services”, and society generally takes them for granted. We assume rivers will run to the oceans, soil will sustain crops, major cities won’t drown. Yet these assumptions are becoming less certain. And despite our dependence on nature, we essentially value it, financially at least, at nil.

Its absence from balance sheets is particularly striking in the business world, since virtually every business relies on nature. Think of a microchip manufacturer that needs huge volumes of water to make its circuits. Its profits may depend on a nearby river, and yet it pays nothing to ensure that the water continues to flow. Or imagine a farmer who relies on bees to pollinate his crops, but never considers that it might make financial sense to protect their breeding habitat. Such ideas have spurred a new approach to conservation, based on assigning financial values to ecosystems. The “ecosystem-services” approach, proponents say, could be its salvation. “The new story,” says Adam Davis, an EIP partner and a pioneer of the ecosystem-services movement, “is the opportunity to align incentives with outcomes, so that people can participate in the protection of the world in the course of doing business.”

Ecosystem Investment Partners and other emerging environmental investment firms are trying to usher in this new economy. EIP ultimately bought Dover Farms, using private-equity capital. It filed a conservation easement on the land (so it can never be developed) and donated the easement to the Nature Conservancy. It then set about filling in canals, planting 250,000 trees and allowing water to return to Dover -- turning the 400 hectares into a “wetland mitigation bank”, a model for a new economy.

In March, Dilks and a few colleagues drove across the Intracoastal Waterway -- an inland route along the Atlantic coast -- over a steel World War II-era bridge. The owner of the last farm in that missing chunk of swamp operates the bridge, pushing and pulling it across the narrow channel by tractor, in exchange for the right to hunt on the Dover land. A short while later, with the bridge retracted and the farmer busy, Dilks’s crew commandeered a Huck Finn-style wooden raft to ferry additional visitors -- including officials from the nearby city of Chesapeake, Virginia -- across the water.

Sleet was hurtling sideways by this time, raining gobs of slush upon the Gore-Tex-clad group as they gathered at the muddy edge of the Great Dismal. The sky was pale grey; thin patches of snow clung to the yellow grass. In the distance, a tall forest of cedar closed in. Unfazed by the weather, several pairs of ducks floated on a shallow pond, while a bald eagle flew overhead. More than 100 trumpeter swans had shown up earlier in the day, though they had since moved on to somewhere deeper in the swamp. Just a year-and-a-half earlier, corn and soy had grown here in neat, irrigated rows.

Leading the group across a soggy meadow and into a pool of calf-deep frigid water was James Remuzzi, an independent environmental consultant who is overseeing the wetlands' reincarnation. Remuzzi proudly pointed out some small trees poking up from the water. Some bore coloured ribbons, indicating that he and his team had planted them. Sloshing beside him, David Mergen of Chesapeake's public-works department was impressed by a pair of metre-high black willows. They were ribbonless, meaning they'd sprung up on their own. "It's evolving back to what it should be," said Remuzzi, whose company, Sustainable Solutions, is based in Washington DC, four hours to the north.

Read more: Sustainable Solutions gets written up in Wired Magazine!

A Prescribed Fire Success Story

Wednesday, 12 August 2009 09:28

It was great to see recent articles in the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun that highlight the results of prescribed fire work we did for The Nature Conservancy MD/DC chapter this past spring.  Not only do the articles help to educate people on the role of prescribed fire, it also illustrates how quickly fire dependent species can rebound once fire is reintroduced.

Read more: A Prescribed Fire Success Story