How impact investing is funding the future of conservation
© Matt Chinworth
A grocery store employee rolls a cart loaded with unsold items into the back room. It contains slightly bruised fruit, prepared meals nearing their expiration date, and loaves of bread baked that morning—most still perfectly good to eat. A lot of it will be discarded the next day.
Small moments like these are part of a much larger global problem: Every year, roughly one-third of all food produced worldwide is lost or wasted. That inefficiency carries enormous consequences—for nature and people.
Consider the big picture
Food loss and waste account for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire aviation sector. When discarded food breaks down in landfills, it releases methane, a powerful climate-warming gas. But the environmental cost begins long before this. Growing, processing, packaging, and transporting food requires vast amounts of land, water, fertilizer, energy, and labor. When food goes uneaten, all those resources are wasted too.
At the same time, expanding farmland to meet global demand remains one of the leading drivers of habitat loss worldwide. Forests, wetlands, and grasslands continue to be converted into cropland, even as enormous quantities of food already produced never reach anyone’s plate.
Solutions do exist. For example, a startup called EatCloud has created a tool to help retailers redirect surplus food to people who need it—before it becomes waste. But good ideas are just the first step. Scaling up solutions requires resources and support, including financial investments.
“This is a model we know works: a solution born from local need, strengthened by investment, and expanded to deliver broader benefits for nature and people.”
Sandra Valenzuela CEO Of WWF-Colombia
Investing smart
Today, the world invests only a fraction of what’s needed to protect the natural systems that sustain human life. This shortfall, often called the nature finance gap, amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
To help close this gap, WWF is directing finance toward real-world solutions—and an important part of the effort is to invest directly in companies developing practical, impact-driven solutions, an approach known as impact investing. Often, these are early-stage businesses with promising ideas that have not yet attracted mainstream investment.
“We’re laser-focused on mobilizing private capital into nature,” says John E. Morton, executive managing director of WWF’s Nature Finance and Investment team. “By stepping in early, WWF helps promising projects and innovations that amplify WWF’s conservation work survive the hardest stage—when good ideas are still risky and are overlooked by most mainstream investors.”
WWF’s current investments span a wide range of sectors— from regenerative agriculture to waste reduction to emerging industries such as seaweed farming. And EatCloud offers a clear example of how this approach can work.
Today, the world invests only a fraction of what’s needed to protect the natural systems that sustain human life. This shortfall, often called the nature finance gap, amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
To help close this gap, WWF is directing finance toward real-world solutions—and an important part of the effort is to invest directly in companies developing practical, impact-driven solutions, an approach known as impact investing. Often, these are early-stage businesses with promising ideas that have not yet attracted mainstream investment.
“We’re laser-focused on mobilizing private capital into nature,” says John E. Morton, executive managing director of WWF’s Nature Finance and Investment team. “By stepping in early, WWF helps promising projects and innovations that amplify WWF’s conservation work survive the hardest stage—when good ideas are still risky and are overlooked by most mainstream investors.”
WWF’s current investments span a wide range of sectors— from regenerative agriculture to waste reduction to emerging industries such as seaweed farming. And EatCloud offers a clear example of how this approach can work.
Nearly $60 trillion of global gross domestic product (GDP) is at risk of disruption if ecosystems continue to decline. Transitioning to a nature-positive economy could generate annual business opportunities worth $10 trillion and create 395 million jobs by 2030.
Rescuing food
Donating food can be an effective way to address the conservation impacts of food waste, but it is often complicated. While recent legislative advances in Colombia have made it easier to donate, and some new policies offer tax credits and other incentives, implementation has been more challenging. Stores must verify nonprofits, complete paperwork, and coordinate pickups with food banks that mostly handle large volumes.
EatCloud has created a digital bridge between the food sector and charities that enables stores, industry, agriculture, restaurants, and hotels to log surplus food as it becomes available and allows established food banks and community groups to claim it in real time. The platform’s dashboards also enable stores to track outcomes: In four years, EatCloud has redistributed enough food to supply 115 million meals across Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico.
Those rescued meals represent far more than food on a plate; for WWF, they also represent resources that were not wasted, contributing to our conservation mission. Donations diverted from landfills through EatCloud’s platform saved enough water to fill more than 12,000 Olympic-size swimming pools and avoided over 190,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions—the same as not driving over 205 million miles in gasoline-powered cars.
Such initiatives are exactly what WWF’s nature finance strategy is meant to support: practical solutions that protect natural resources while improving people’s lives to help close the global nature finance gap.
The world is currently investing only about 20% of what’s needed to safeguard ecosystems, which has created a “nature finance gap” estimated at $1 trillion annually.
What is nature finance?
Earth’s forests, rivers, oceans, and other natural systems clean our air and water, grow our food, and support millions of livelihoods. But despite nature’s importance, we are currently investing only 20% of what is needed to keep it healthy and intact. This “nature finance gap” amounts to nearly $1 trillion every year.
Nature finance refers to the money directed toward protecting and restoring these natural systems. It brings together funding from many sources, including government spending, private investment, and philanthropy.
WWF’s Nature Finance and Investment strategy works to increase these flows of funding toward nature. It includes helping develop markets that pay for the benefits nature provides, such as storing carbon and protecting water supplies; working with governments to restructure or refinance debt so countries can invest more in conservation; and investing in technologies that can achieve conservation at scale (also known as impact investing).
Together, these efforts help move conservation beyond one-time donations and toward stable, long-term funding that can support environmental protection at the scale the challenge demands.
© Sara Germain/USFWS
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