Will Ecosystem Services Attract Investors?

Abstract

An unanswered question in conservation economics is how to leverage impact investing for the provision of ecosystem services. We develop and apply a general conceptual model of a diversified ecosystem service portfolio to highlight two key insights about which ecosystem services will attract impact investing. First, generating a positive expected return via markets or payments for ecosystem services is a necessary but not sufficient condition to elicit impact investment in ecosystem services. Second, ecosystem services can exhibit a novel diversification value that increases the value of the ecosystem service asset to an institutional investor.