MMW Perspective 3: Bridging Project Finance and Landscape Scale

“How do you move from sitting in a tree in front of a bulldozer to influencing trillions of dollars of capital?”

Nature finance is often framed as a question of scale.

But scale means very different things depending on where you stand.

In the third perspective from Gerana's Making Money Work for Landscapes series, Paul Chatterton (Landscape Finance Lab) reflects on a journey that has taken him from frontline forest activism in Tasmania to engaging with some of the largest pools of capital in the world.

Drawing on four decades of experience across conservation, carbon finance and investment, Paul explores a fundamental challenge at the heart of nature finance: nature works at landscape scale, while finance is largely organised around projects.

Rivers and their wider catchments, pollination systems, and habitats connected through corridors all function across entire landscapes. Yet much of the financial system remains structured around discrete projects, sectors, commodities and asset classes. The result is a persistent disconnect between the scale of ecological systems and the scale of investment decisions.

Rather than viewing this as a barrier, Paul proposes a provocative possibility:

Landscapes themselves may provide the bridge.

Throughout the piece, he invites us to think beyond individual projects and towards the frameworks, governance structures and business propositions that could connect project-level investment with landscape-level outcomes.

An important theme running through the article is place-based stewardship. For Paul, lasting success comes when landscape ambitions are owned by the people who live and work within those landscapes, with benefits shared accordingly.

For anyone working at the intersection of finance, conservation and landscape resilience, Paul offers an optimistic challenge: perhaps the task ahead is not to invent entirely new forms of finance, but to create the structures capable of bringing landscape ambition and investment together.

This article is the third in a six-part series exploring how money behaves inside the systems shaping landscapes.

We hope it sparks reflection, discussion and perhaps a few new questions of your own.

Further reading:

MMW Perspective 3: Bridging Project Finance and Landscape Scale, by Paul Chatterton (attached)