Conservation Finance Network

Conservation Finance Network: Where Conservation Meets Capital

More and more, the conservation community is recognizing that traditional funding models can’t keep pace with the need for conservation capital. At a time of modest public funding and limited philanthropic dollars, innovative funding and financing strategies hold great promise in narrowing the gap between the financial resources that are available and the scale of the conservation need.

About Conservation Finance Network

The Conservation Finance Network (CFN) advances land and resource conservation by expanding the use of innovative and effective funding and financing strategies. We support a growing network of public, private and nonprofit professionals through practitioner convenings, intensive trainings, and information dissemination to increase the financial resources deployed for conservation. Our web presence is produced in partnership with Yale Center for Business and the Environment. This web presence is a leading resource for practitioners, investors, conservationists, students and others. Our work draws from a start in and focus on the United States and touches on international approaches. We produce original content and curate the work of other organizations. We create news, research, policy, training and convenings related to conservation finance. We cover all the world’s ecosystems including forests, agriculture, oceans, cities and rivers.

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Our Story

CFN is the culmination of years of collaborative effort by leading practitioners in the field. The initiative grew out of a pilot workshop envisioned at Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2006 and held at Yale School of the Environment in 2007. This initial training course – nicknamed the “Boot Camp” for its intensity – tackled the art and science of raising, borrowing, managing and investing money for land and resource conservation. Its success energized momentum for additional workshops, provided a clear rationale for backbone support in this emerging field, and spurred the eventual creation of CFN at Island Press with seed money from the United States Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration Program.

We worked for many years out of The Conservation Fund, a top-ranked organization for efficiency and effectiveness that works to achieve environmental and economic outcomes. Since 2021, we have acted as an independent organization with fiscal sponsorship from Multiplier.