In this episode Eric Cooperström, Senior Director, Asset Management at NatureVest part of The Nature Conservancy, discusses NatureVest’s shared conservation agenda to drive conservation at scale and plans to make it repeatable. Learn more about how NatureVest operates within The Nature Conservancy, the impact of the Cumberland Forest LP and what 2020 looks like for impact investing in conservation.



What we’re doing is trying to channel capital at scale into distinct strategies, underlying those priorities to really move the conservation needle. And we’re trying to do it in a scalable and replicable way so that if we do a pilot transaction or we do even a larger transaction right off the bat, we want there to be runway to repeat those transactions, assuming they are successful over time and really drive conservation at scale and drive our contribution toward those global issues.Eric Cooperström, Senior Director, Asset Management at NatureVest | The Nature Conservancy







Transcript of Interview with Eric Cooperström



Jenelle:Hello and welcome. Thanks for being here with us today Eric.



Eric:Thank you for having me.



Jenelle:Today, we have with us Eric Cooperström, Senior director of NatureVest, which is the impact investing arm of the Nature Conservancy and you can learn more about NatureVest at the Nature Conservancy website. They do have their own space on the website, which you’ll be able to find attached to this podcast, but you can go to nature.org to learn more. So to get started, Eric, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Nature Conservancy as well as the role of NatureVest within it?



Eric:Sure. Thanks Jenelle. And so the Nature Conservancy is one of the largest nonprofits focused on conservation in the world. We have over 4,500 employees spread out across every state in the United States and over 75 countries internationally. And we really work across the entire conservation spectrum from policy to on the ground conservation and the Conservancy has a long history. We’ve been around for about seven decades doing this work. So we have quite a bit of experience and as you can imagine, our strategy has evolved over that time from our origins as primarily a land trust. So buying high conservation value areas and preserving them and then transferring those ultimately to long-term conservation owners to more expansive focus across the conservation spectrum.



Eric:NatureVest itself is, as you mentioned, the impact investing arm of the Conservancy. We were founded about six years ago based on the premise that really all of the philanthropic capital and all of the government capital in the world is not going to be enough to address the major conservation and climate issues that the world faces. And so what we need to do is mobilize private capital and that’s what NatureVest seeks to do. We develop transactions that have both a conservation impact target as well as a financial return target for investors and we seek to crowd in private capital toward those conservation ends.



Jenelle:That’s certainly a big mandate both from just the investment arm but also obviously of the Conservancy as well. Can before we get into talking more about the organization, can you tell us a little bit about your role within NatureVest?



Eric:Sure, so my role is as many roles across the Conservancy given that we are a pretty agile organization and especially within NatureVest, you know, we’re a 20 person team. So we all wear multiple hats. My primary primary role is as Senior Director of Asset Management. So I focus my core responsibilities on our closed portfolio of transactions. We’ve closed 11 deals to date with external ...