Nature-Based Financial Assets

A new company backed by conservation veterans is trying to make nature's value visible enough to trade. Landseed says its goal is to measure ecological outcomes below the canopy and turn them into financial assets that can help conservation projects generate recurring revenue. The company was cofounded by Holdfast Collective executive director Greg Curtis, along with Alex Roessner and Eric Dinerstein. Curtis said the idea grew out of seeing how hard conservation partners struggled to raise money, creating risk for the projects they were trying to sustain. Measuring more than carbon Landseed uses sensor hardware and a structured data feed to track ecological activity directly on the ground, rather than relying only on satellite views. Curtis said satellites offer a strong top-down picture, but the company needs sensors to understand what is happening below the canopy. Dinerstein, a conservation biologist and former chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, has developed optical technology that tracks biodiversity in a given area. Landseed says those sensors can be deployed in a mesh around a landscape and send data back to conservation organizations. The sensors record every 10 minutes and track wildlife presence or absence, moisture levels, relative humidity, water temperature, weather conditions, soil moisture, fresh water quality, and soil carbon. Curtis said visual monitoring is the current focus, with acoustic measurement also planned. Three layers in Landseed's model Landseed describes its system in three parts. The first layer is the Earth Pulse Node, which refers to the sensors that collect ecological data from the field. The second layer is Earth Credits, the credits minted from those verified ecological outcomes. Curtis said the conservation organization owns the credits and can sell them on voluntary markets, similar to carbon credits. Potential buyers include companies, municipalities looking to protect natural resources, foundations, and private philanthropy organizations. Curtis said the credits are meant to be more holistic than a simple carbon-only approach, and could also interest chief investment officers looking to place part of an endowment into nature-based financial assets. Landseed says it will not own the credits or handle their sale. Curtis said the company wants to focus on product quality and help bring a market for nature-based financial assets into existence with integrity. The third layer is Earth Signals, a structured reference-data feed that Landseed plans to license to insurance, capital, and conservation research markets. Funding and broader ambition Landseed recently received a $400,000 social impact investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, bringing total funding to $500,000. Curtis said the company is not just producing another version of offsets, but building “a new commodity class, grounded in property law and ecological science, so that conservation can finally fund itself.” He said the push for hard climate tech has focused heavily on carbon capture, even as biodiversity numbers worsen. Curtis pointed to the scale of the challenge, but said he remains encouraged by the passion of conservation workers, indigenous partners, and scientists who are trying to create outcomes quickly. AgFunderNews reported the launch as Landseed positioned itself as an attempt to build a financial market around conservation projects rather than another offset business. The company plans to keep its attention on measuring ecological activity and proving outcomes that can support a market for nature-based assets. Read more at: agfundernews.com

Landseed Wants to Turn Conservation Into a Market That Pays for Itself