California: Forest Resilience Bond

California has a lot of money. How are they thinking about ecosystem services?

Highly relevant, conceptually.

Multi-stakeholder offering: provides a return to investors.
Subsidizes non-commercial forest management.
Not a grant, but a loan to the administrating partner, the national forest foundation. Directly pays contractors.
AAA, as an insurance company that pays for wildfires, is also spiritually "invested" in not having wildfires.

Forest Resilience Bond provides $4 million in private capital from four investors to finance ecological restoration treatments across 15,000 acres of national forest.
The State of California and the Yuba Water Agency are repaying investors at contracted rates as restoration work is completed, with the Tahoe National Forest providing in-kind support and funding for project planning, development and execution.
It looks like:
1. Investors provide dollars to front-load a decade's worth of forest management work, and to make it more efficient. "FRB financing has made it possible for the Tahoe to accelerate work and complete projects in just four years instead of the projected 10 to 12 years."
2. Investors get paid back by the state/utility. The state is still the source of funding for the work.
  - From David Hodgson: In the first instance the payback source was the energy / water utility. Forest fire damages soil, reduces water infiltration, and causes all sorts of problems for the utility.
Here's the infographic:

General 3 - Blue Forest Conservation

This is their team. If we decide we want to re-create this business unit:
1. Do we have mutual connections with any of these cats on Linkedin?
2. Get an intro, and go from there.
Note: This an entire business model in itself. It's largely B2G (business to government), i.e. the long sales cycle can bankrupt a young company. If only we can a connection with a large utility company...