{"id":793,"date":"2005-05-01T20:50:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-02T01:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=793"},"modified":"2005-05-01T20:50:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-02T01:50:00","slug":"finding-the-buyer-for-forests-and-swamps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=793","title":{"rendered":"Finding the buyer for forests and swamps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Economist had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3886849\">a few encouraging stories<\/a> about a new way of financing the environmental restoration of forests and wetlands.<br \/>\nThe Panama Canal will suffer from floods and silting because the hills upstream are being deforested. So a forestry insurance company is seeking to issue a 25-year bond to pay for the forest to be replanted.  The Economist lists a number of other examples of &#8220;downstream long bonds&#8221;. For example, New York City uses similar financing to keep the Catskill feeder streams clean, to protect the City&#8217;s water supply.<br \/>\nOf course, the &#8220;downstream long bond&#8221; solution only works when there is an identifiable, deep-pocketed downstream buyer.  When the &#8220;buyers&#8221; are spread out &#8212; like citizens harmed by polluted air &#8212; the government regulation is probably needed to assert the collective demand of those who value clean air.<br \/>\nWhen I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0316353000\/qid=1114996569\/sr=8-1\/ref=pd_csp_1\/104-7698390-9564764?v=glance&#038;s=books&#038;n=507846\">Natural Capitalism<\/a> a few years ago, it struck me that the lack of financing was one of the major obstacles to sustainable business practices &#8212; and that there were interesting opportunities for new financial instruments.<br \/>\nAnother good sign is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cleanedge.com\/reports-trends2005.php\">rise of VC investments in clean energy<\/a> from $509 million in 2003 to $520 million in 2004 &#8212; though this is still small potatoes for the $20B US VC market.<br \/>\nThe sheer presence of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cleanedge.com\/\">market research firm<\/a> doing segmentation and forecasting of industry revenues and VC investment is a good sign of an emerging market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Economist had a few encouraging stories about a new way of financing the environmental restoration of forests and wetlands. The Panama Canal will suffer from floods and silting because the hills upstream are being deforested. So a forestry insurance company is seeking to issue a 25-year bond to pay for the forest to be &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=793\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Finding the buyer for forests and swamps&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-cN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}