The Demeter Initiative

Our mission is to improve efficiency in blended structures, in order to redirect existing— and attract new —flows of mainstream private capital to sustainable land use and agri-production systems worldwide. Private finance has a vital role to play to enable nature-based solutions to play their essential role in supporting the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. But today, mainstream investment in Natural Capital remains largely untapped— or worse still, it is underwriting unsustainable and destructive industrial land-use models. Getting blended finance right means designing and launching new structures that optimise the most powerful and scalable elements of public (and philanthropic) funding and private investment. The Demeter Initiative aims to scope and design a vehicle that can complement and enhance the suite of existing (and emerging) public, private and blended finance initiatives aimed at increasing capital availability and throughput in the natural capital / conservation finance space, with a particular focus on outcomes related to sustainable land use in the context of climate mitigation. Our hypothesis is that until we succeed in unlocking sufficient blended finance that adequately de-risks an investment class that is still new and opaque for private investors, the road to the scale required shall remain blocked.