Monitoring financial returns for resilient coasts

Abby Smith
2 min readAug 14, 2018

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The concept of a triple bottom line — profit, people, and planet — aims to broaden an organization’s strategic focus beyond financial returns to include social and environmental responsibility. But how exactly do we measure benefits to communities and ecosystems? An innovative financial tool may bring us one step closer by linking financial returns with environmental outcomes.

Environmental Impact Bonds, or EIBs, offer investors returns if projects achieve desired environmental outcomes. EIBs are well-suited for investors seeking to support conservation work. If environmental projects achieve their intended results, investors receive a return on their dollars.

Louisiana is leading the way in a new era of private investment to support coastal resilience. A new report, “Financing Resilient Communities and Coastlines: How Environmental Impact Bonds Can Accelerate Wetland Restoration in Louisiana and Beyond,” details a project led by the Environmental Defense Fund and Quantified Ventures to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands using the EIB structure. However, with this and other EIB projects, accurate measurements of environmental outcomes are challenging and costly. As with many efforts in conservation finance, high transaction costs can make projects (and investment returns) infeasible. That’s where we come in! The Upstream Tech Platform meets this critical need for cost-efficient, accurate monitoring and verification of the bond.

By processing terabytes of ground truth data, we have established a baseline for wetland restoration sites and actively monitor the progress of ongoing restoration work in near real-time. Remotely sensed data can be used by stakeholders to inform project management and rigorously evaluate the success of coastal resiliency efforts using wetland health indicators. Every 100 minutes, approximately one football field of land is lost as Louisiana’s coastal wetlands recede into open water. Given the speed and scale of Louisiana’s eroding shoreline, up-to-date monitoring is critical for determining optimal strategies to protect these valuable yet vulnerable ecosystems.

Source: Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act Program. Credit: Nelson Hsu/NPR

As coastal regions across the globe cope with sea level rise, land loss, and increasingly damaging weather events, effective restoration is critical for coastal resiliency. Paired with verifiable environmental monitoring, EIBs are a promising strategy to yield meaningful returns for investors, communities, and coastal ecosystems.

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