The Innovative Finance for National Forests (IFNF) program will award $2.2 million for eleven new projects selected in May 2023. The IFNF program supports projects that leverage private and public capital other than U.S. Forest Service annual appropriations to enhance the resilience of the National Forest System or adjacent private lands and that seek to deliver commensurate returns to stakeholders. This partnership is funded and administered by the USDA Forest Service National Partnership Office’s Conservation Finance Program and the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities. Some examples of the selected projects include:
- $500,000 to Arizona’s Salt River Project will help attract long-term funding and private investment by quantifying the co-benefits of water and carbon from forest restoration activities.
- $240,000 to the World Resources Institute will help scale the Weber River Watershed Resilience Fund, benefitting watershed health and wildfire resilience in Utah.
- $150,000 to The Freshwater Trust will help develop a Watershed Outcomes Bankframework to deploy funds to projects that most rapidly achieve watershed resilience targets in the Cosumnes River watershed in California.
- $160,000 to the Maine Mountain Collaborative to secure recreation revenues that support management of select private timber lands and watersheds acquired by the Exemplary Forestry Investment Fund.
For more information, read the news release about the IFNF program, or contact Sophie Beavin (Sophie.Beavin@usda.gov) or Nathalie Woolworth (Nathalie.Woolworth@usda.gov).