Authors: Andrew Heald, Board Chair iNovaland and Rose Kobusinge, Public Relations, iNovaland
We (iNovaland®) have spent the past several years building nature-based solutions (NbS) and restoration projects in Ghana and Brazil, and there’s a pattern across this sector that most developers here would recognise immediately. We were lucky to have had capital from the start for our two flagship projects in the two countries, thanks to our funders and partners. Just as important was building trust with our teams and communities from day one, staying transparent and keeping communication open throughout, and holding a shared vision for what success looked like for people, nature and climate. However, the status quo across most of this sector is that the capital exists somewhere in the system, but it rarely turns up where a project actually needs it, and almost never at the pace the work itself moves. That pattern is a large part of why we funded a report from Hamerkop Climate Change & Finance, produced together with The Art of Forests and launched back in June at London Climate Action Week, called “Bridging the Disconnect: Why Nature-Based Carbon Projects Struggle to Access Capital”.
The report landed at a particular moment for the market, with demand for high-integrity carbon credits growing and the case for nature as a serious asset class feeling stronger than it has in years, reflected in the finding that announced NbS offtakes more than doubled in the first half of 2025 compared with the year before (MSCI, 2025). Even so, as the report puts it, some of the most carefully designed, community-rooted projects in this market still cannot find the capital they need.
iNovaland sponsored the production of this report, and the reason goes beyond the funding gap itself, real as that gap is. We have been restoring degraded landscapes since 2020 and are currently developing large-scale nature-based carbon projects in Ghana and Brazil, so the report’s account of long development timelines and a genuinely demanding certification process is familiar. The report puts hard numbers behind just how wide that gap can run.
As Andrew MacCormack, Chief Investment Officer at Medius Earth, puts it in the report, the missing middle works less like a funding gap and more like a structural exclusion. The financing mechanics matter, but the report’s more interesting argument for us is about why these projects exist in the first place.
The outcomes half of blended finance
Most of the current conversation about nature-based carbon centres on blended finance, grants and concessional capital sitting alongside commercial money to de-risk a project until it can carry itself, which is a fair place to focus but only covers half of what actually needs addressing. The other half is blended outcomes, which gets far less attention even though a project can issue high-integrity credits and still leave the surrounding landscape, and the people who live on it, no more resilient than before the project started. Carbon is a mechanism for directing capital toward better land use and stronger rural livelihoods. A project that builds soil health and diversifies farm income alongside the credits, while also strengthening the local institutions that hold a landscape together, is one whose value survives past a single crediting period, and that’s the kind of project we build.
Why language and trust matter as much as capital
The report also shows something we see constantly on the ground, that progress only holds together if the people involved can understand each other. Local communities, developers, funders, standards bodies and insurers are all working to different timelines and different assumptions about risk, in a language that often doesn’t cross over between them. Destin Whitehurst, Head of Carbon Investments at NatureRe, puts the mismatch plainly in the report, noting that organisations doing fantastic work on the ground often don’t have the resources to navigate a complex diligence process, and that the reverse holds just as often. The report’s own recommendations point toward the same fix from the investor side, more proportionate due diligence calibrated to a project’s actual stage, and more collaborative partnership models that bring investors and developers into the same conversation early.
Our own experience makes this point better than an abstract argument could. When we started building our projects in Ghana and Brazil, relying entirely on outside consultants would have been the easier route, but Andrew Heald, iNovaland’s Chair and co-founder, has written about choosing to build an in-house team instead.
The reasoning kept coming back to one question, as Andrew puts it, of how you build something meant to last decades if the core knowledge lives somewhere else.
Andrew has also written that forestry has never really been about trees so much as about people, and that the same holds true for a carbon project, where local communities need to be brought in as early as possible and engaged as an essential partner, rather than treated as a box to tick for Free, Prior and Informed Consent. That’s a large part of how trust gets built into a project rather than assumed at the outset.
What trust buys a project
None of that shows up in a contract or a due diligence pack on its own, because ecological and social realities set the pace on these projects far more than any financing timeline does. A missed planting window can cost months, and a community relationship rushed to hit a financing deadline can cost far more. Beau Milliken, co-founder of Kijani Forestry, put it well in the report when he said trust starts long before the trees are in the ground, and that a month’s delay in funding can translate into months of lost work, a reality investors rarely grasp until they’ve lived through a planting season themselves.
That kind of trust is built by showing up, year after year, until governance structures that look fine on paper start functioning in practice. It’s part of why our own projects take the time they do, and why we think due diligence works best when it’s proportionated to a project’s actual stage.
The Kilimanjaro Project’s experience shows what this looks like when it actually works. Sarah Scott, the project’s founder, spent three years trying to raise the first $2 million needed to onboard 2,500 smallholder farmers in Tanzania, and later reflected that this first tranche was harder to secure than the $24 million that followed it. The outcome changed once an investor became willing to approach buyers jointly with the project team, sharing due diligence and shaping the commercial pathway together. That’s the collaborative model the report recommends, and in this case it’s also what moved a stalled project forward.
When people can understand each other and the trust behind that is real, projects stop renegotiating their expectations under pressure halfway through and set them at the start instead. Ten or twenty years after the first credit gets issued, that early groundwork tends to be the difference between a project that’s still delivering for its landscape and communities, and one that quietly stopped.
iNovaland does that kind of groundwork on every project it takes on, and the report makes a broader version of that same case, one no single organisation could make alone. The full report is available through our partner, the Art of Forests website.
