Air, Land, Water: Underwriting the Full Spectrum of Nature-Based Assets
Why it matters
For years, nature-based assets have been treated as a compliance line item — something companies buy to offset emissions, not something investors hold to build wealth. That's changing. As regulatory frameworks mature and environmental markets deepen, nature-based solutions are increasingly being structured and underwritten in ways that resemble conventional infrastructure: durable, regulation-backed demand, contracted cash flows, and long-duration returns.
But underwriting nature like infrastructure requires solving two problems most investors haven't fully confronted. First, a carbon credit only prices one thing an acre does — it says nothing about the water it stores, the biodiversity it supports, or the soil health it rebuilds. Full-value underwriting means learning to price nature as a stack of ecosystem services, not a single commodity, and building the standards and data to make that pricing credible to buyers. Second, the supply behind these assets has an origin story that matters to durability: a growing share of high-quality nature-based assets comes from regeneratively repurposed farmland — marginal, flood-prone, or economically depleted acres that landowners convert to forest for a new, decades-long income stream.
This session connects all three threads — sourcing, valuation, and institutional underwriting — to examine what it actually takes to move nature from an offset line to a balance sheet holding: how investors evaluate counterparty risk and cash-flow durability on land-based assets, how full-value pricing changes the underwriting math, and why the next generation of institutional-grade nature assets may be built from farmland most investors have never thought to look at.