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Agriculture in Canada is facing mounting challenges: extreme weather, rising input costs, trade disruptions and market instability. At the same time, producers are being encouraged to adopt beneficial management practices (BMPs) to adapt to growing climate volatility. However, transitioning to these practices often brings financial uncertainty. Innovative de-risking tools — designed to reduce uncertainty, encourage on-farm innovation, and lower long-term public indemnity costs — have shown promise in other contexts.
In collaboration with Farmers for Climate Solutions and the Smart Prosperity Institute, we are working directly with farmers, insurers, and key public, private, and financial sector actors to explore the environmental and economic value of these tools in the Canadian context.
Starting in 2025 and 2026 with small-scale, on-farm pilot projects in Ontario corn production, and expanding in 2027 to other provinces and production systems, our aim is to test how these tools can be adapted to different regional contexts — and to identify what it takes, and who needs to be at the table, to enable their long-term success and sustainability.
Learn moreTo help preserve Canada’s abundant natural capital, we worked with Realize Capital Partners to solicit proposals for innovative investment strategies or products in need of additional funding. Through this process, Realize Capital Partners awarded grant funding to two organizations.
A report distills key takeaways from this RFP process, surfacing innovative ideas, revealing emerging trends and highlighting what is needed to mobilize private capital toward nature-based solutions. This includes an invitation to capital providers to step in with catalytic support to help move more promising ideas from design to implementation.
Learn moreWith funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Hub conducted a market research exercise in early 2025 to assess the feasibility of a new national virtual matchmaking platform for nature. The goal: to improve connectivity between capital seekers and capital providers and accelerate investment.
Given that Canada’s nature finance market is still in its early stages, with limited products currently available for listing, and considering other contextual factors, our recommendation from this research was to explore enhancing existing platforms to include nature finance offerings rather than build something new, and to leverage broader networks to share opportunities.
In line with this recommendation, the Hub is exploring a collaboration with our partner SVX to create a Nature-Based Solutions Collection on the SVX Impact Index platform, spotlighting investment opportunities in Canada. We have also joined the Nature Tech Collective to help put Canadian naturetech investment opportunities on the map.
The Hub is a member of the City of Vancouver’s Regional Green Infrastructure Network Financing Advisory Committee. The Metro Vancouver Board adopted Metro 2050, which included a requirement to work with member jurisdictions, First Nations, and other agencies to identify a regional green infrastructure network that connects ecosystems and builds on existing local networks, while maximizing resilience, biodiversity, and human health benefits. The plan also includes an action to acquire, restore, enhance, and protect lands, in collaboration with adjacent member jurisdictions and other partners, that will enable ecosystem connectivity in a regional green infrastructure network.
Financing has been identified as one of the main barriers to collaboratively protecting, enhancing, restoring, and connecting the network. Metro Vancouver Regional Planning staff has retained a consultant to explore innovative, sustainable financing options, and the Hub sits on the advisory committee to help advance this work.
The Hub participates in acatalytic capital funders group work on civic infrastructure bonds. The bond is being designed and structured by Ombrello Solutions. Together with others like foundations and private family offices, the Hub is exploring the role of catalytic capital related to civic infrastructure bonds. These systemic investments into urban nature and biodiversity are vital..
Capital holders need to know that financing needs to have an assured source of repayment, the annual interest payments have to be reasonably guaranteed, in line with other market instruments, and the return on the instrument has to be fair and in line with the perceived market risk.
Civic infrastructure bonds are innovative in that they focus on urban natural assets, valuations are based on an adjacent mature asset class (real estate), the integration of community endowment funds, and they rely on nationally pooled capital, deployed into a portfolio of qualified local investments. This ambitious financing solution has a high potential for replication across major urban areas in Canada.
Tech is an important part of a future-fit nature finance market. A mature nature finance market will rely on diverse competencies, and technology is a key part of the ecosystem. That’s why we’ve joined the Nature Tech Collective to help put Canadian nature fintech on the map, as outlined in NTC’s nature finance fintech report.
The Hub also works with partners like Nations First Technologies to ensure we advance tech and nature finance in alignment with the spirit of Economic Reconciliation. We also collaborate as part of the Advancing Tech for Nature Working Group.
For Hub partners, the opportunity to connect into this global nature tech community through the Hub is a valuable way to expand their impact, share knowledge, build relationships, and access emerging innovations.
