For most of the past decade, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) held much promise but did not scale. Over 85% of NbS was public money (UNEP). Implementation was project-oriented, location-specific, and technically complex. The dominant narrative was that while NbS delivers enormous ecological value, the business case is weak and they cannot survive without grants or concessional finance.

That framing is becoming outdated. Not because it was wrong (it still holds for a several NbS types) but because the private sector is beginning to engage with NbS on entirely different terms. Not as a project to fund but as a strategy to deploy.

NbS as a Strategic Operating Layer

For many land-owning commodity businesses, NbS is becoming an operating model. NbS practices — agroforestry, improved forest management, regenerative agriculture, riparian buffer restoration — are unlocking values in ways that go beyond project-specific use cases and affecting business-wide resilience and revenue generation.

The operating model unlocks is value across three distinct fronts:

Defensive value: Better-managed land is more resilient land. Healthier soils hold water longer during drought. Diversified canopy cover buffers against pest outbreaks. Longer rotation cycles reduce wildfire exposure. In a world where climate variability is increasingly a material financial risk, this is not a soft benefit; it is balance-sheet protection. The commodity supply becomes more predictable, input costs stabilize, and the business becomes less exposed to the physical shocks that are beginning to show up in commodity price volatility globally.

Core commodity value: NbS-aligned land management tends to improve the underlying productivity of the land over time. Healthier soils produce better yields. Shade-grown systems improve crop quality. The same management shift that delivers ecological co-benefits also improves the long-run economics of the core commodity business. This is not a trade-off but a compounding alignment.

Stacked revenue value: Carbon markets, biodiversity credit schemes, water quality payments, and conservation easements are creating mechanisms through which the previously non-monetary benefits of better land management can generate tangible, contracted revenue. These markets are at different stages of maturity (carbon markets being the furthest along) but the direction is clear. Land that was generating one revenue stream is beginning to generate several. The underlying asset is the same; the value architecture above it is expanding.

The land doesn’t change. The management does. And increasingly, the market is beginning to pay for both what that management produces and what it preserves.

Weyerhaeuser: Building a New Business Vertical from the Same Land

Weyerhaeuser is the largest private timberland owner in the United States, managing approximately 10.4 million acres. It is, unambiguously, a timber company. But over the past several years, it has systematically added NbS as an operating layer across its estate and is reaping returns from all three fronts.

On defensive value: Improved Forest Management (IFM) practices — extended harvest rotations, strategic thinning, greater biomass retention — improve forest health and reduce exposure to wildfire, pest outbreaks, and climate-driven productivity loss. These are the same risks that threaten the core timber revenue, and better land management directly mitigates them.

On core commodity value: IFM is not a sacrifice of timber production; it is a restructuring of the timber harvest cycle that, over a longer horizon, increases total volume and stand quality. BCG analysis suggests that NbS-integrated forest management can increase a forest’s 30-year net present value by up to 50%. Weyerhaeuser’s own position is that carbon projects are only approved where they complement, not compete with, timber revenues.

On stacked revenue value: In 2023, Weyerhaeuser completed its first voluntary carbon market transaction. It sold verified credits from its Kibby Skinner IFM project in Maine, with American Carbon Registry (ACR) certification. It has set a $100 million revenue target from its Natural Climate Solutions business, stacking carbon credit revenue on top of timber from the same land. Mitigation banking, conservation easements, and renewable energy rights on its estate are extending that stack further.

Weyerhaeuser hasn’t become an NbS company. It has become a timber company with a well-structured NbS operating layer — and the value of that layer is now materializing in contracted, audited revenue.

Starbucks: Protecting the Value of What Already Exists

Even land-dependent (not land-owning) businesses are deploying NbS. Starbucks is a powerful example of a business using NbS logic through its supply chain to protect the value of its core commodity: coffee.

Climate variability is an existential risk to Arabica coffee. More than half of currently suitable Arabica-growing land could become unusable by 2050 under current warming trajectories. Starbucks has responded not with offsetting or corporate sustainability pledges, but with a direct, operational intervention. It is developing climate-resilient coffee tree varieties at their Hacienda Alsacia research farm in Costa Rica, and distributing over 100 million of these trees, for free, to farmer communities across Central America and Mexico.

This is not philanthropy. It is supply chain risk management expressed through NbS. By improving the climate resilience of the farms that supply their beans, Starbucks is protecting the long-term availability and quality of their core commodity. They have also embedded regenerative farming training into their CAFE Practices certification, tying a sourcing premium to land management standards that deliver both ecological and productivity improvements.

Starbucks is capturing primarily defensive value from this strategy. The stacked revenue from carbon or biodiversity credits flows to the farmer, not to Starbucks directly. But the value it protects — reliable access to premium Arabica at scale — is worth considerably more to a $36 billion business than any credit revenue would be.

Two Futures for NbS

My take is that NbS is likely to diverge into two structurally distinct streams.

The first public NbS stream covers what the development sector has always championed: restoring and rewilding degraded land, building urban green corridors to reduce flood risk, and conserving biodiverse hotspots. These interventions generate real ecological value. But that value — cleaner air, flood attenuation, biodiversity — accrues to society broadly and cannot easily be captured by a private investor. Without a commercial land use underneath, there is no revenue base. This stream will remain dependent on public and blended finance, and that is not a failure. It is a structural feature of what it is trying to produce.

The second, private NbS stream, is different in kind. It applies nature-positive land management practices over a pre-existing commercial land use: a timber plantation, a coffee/tea estate, a cocoa farm. Here, the ecological improvement is not the end product. It is a co-output of better land management that simultaneously strengthens the core business and unlocks new revenue. The land doesn’t change; what changes is how it is managed, creating measurable, appropriable value.

The implication for capital allocators is significant. The most interesting NbS investment opportunities may not be in standalone NbS project developers, but in the second stream of NbS finance. Commodity businesses that are intelligently deploying NbS as an operating strategy and the service providers and platforms that are helping them structure, measure, and monetize that deployment are investment-ready.

References and resources

1. Finance Earth: A market review of NbS Investments (2021)
2. Value of Nature: The Investment Case for Nature-based Solutions
3. State of Finance for Nature 2026
4. Van Raalte, D. and Ranger, N. (2023). Financing Nature-Based Solutions for Adaptation at Scale: Learning from Specialised Investment Managers and Nature Funds. Global Center on Adaptation and Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.
5. Why Starbucks is giving away climate-tolerant coffee trees
6. Weyerhaeuser Sees Long Term Value Creation from Voluntary Carbon Market Participation