Insights on Investing in Conservation of Food and Water Systems in Asia Pacific

Insights on investing in conservation of food and water systems in Asia Pacific

1. A strategic opening for catalytic and impact-oriented capital

• Asia Pacific is experiencing heightened philanthropic, development finance, impact investor, corporate and policy attention to climate adaptation, food security, regenerative agriculture and water resilience.
• Participants described a “perfect storm” of rising regional need, growing funder interest, 2030 corporate commitments and emerging multilateral initiatives.
• This creates a timely opening for conservation organisations to help shape capital stacks around food and water systems that deliver climate, biodiversity, livelihood and resilience outcomes.
• For funders and partners, this suggests that early collaboration is most valuable where organisations can help shape not only individual interventions, but the enabling architecture for credible landscape platforms: shared outcomes, delivery partners, safeguards, evidence and capital sequencing.
• TNC has strong experience to draw on to support capacity building in the region.  These include its global water funds experience, the Nature for Water Facility, watershed investment programme tools, Nature Bonds, and Asia Pacific aquaculture and landscape work. These examples can help translate the discussion from a strategic opportunity into translatable delivery models.

2. Capital is present but misaligned with systems needs

• Funding is concentrated in a relatively narrow set of climate adaptation and resilience solutions, including large-scale infrastructure, basin management, water treatment, disaster readiness and upstream agricultural production.
• Participants identified gaps in downstream food system infrastructure, including storage, transport, cold chain, warehousing and processing. Additional gaps were noted in water recovery, circularity and post-disaster response.
• These gaps influence food/resource loss, farmer income stability, water quality, ecosystem pressure and community resilience, representing outcomes often under-priced by commercial capital but central to public value and long-term resilience.
• These are the kinds of system gaps where TNC’s scientific, community, policy and finance capabilities can help convert fragmented needs into coherent opportunities, particularly if in partnership with other credible NGOs or academic institutions.

3. Agriculture offers near-term entry points; water needs catalytic structuring

• Agriculture currently attracts the highest level of active investor and funder interest, making it a practical near-term entry point for pilots, blended finance design and livelihood-centered impact strategies.
• Water attracts the highest exploratory interest, suggesting strong potential but a less mature pathway for deployable capital.
• Agriculture may therefore offer more immediate opportunities for grant-enabled demonstration and impact capital mobilisation, while water may require more upstream work to structure financeable opportunities, build evidence and design suitable concessional or risk-sharing instruments in the region.
• While water opportunities are still exploratory, partners may find value in working through trusted intermediaries that can combine landscape science, project preparation, public-sector engagement and experience with water funds, water bonds and nature-based water-security models.
• TNC’s water funds model is directly relevant here: TNC has facilitated more than 30 water funds globally, including examples in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and China’s Longwu Reservoir, where upstream land and water stewardship are linked to downstream water security and financing mechanisms.
• The most promising opportunities sit at the intersection of food security, water security, farmer livelihoods, biodiversity and climate resilience.

4. The core constraint is financeable pipeline, not just capital availability

• Participants repeatedly emphasised that the main challenge is not a lack of capital, but a lack of financeable, aggregated and well-evidenced pipeline that can meet different funder and investor mandates.
• The pipeline challenge includes limited deal flow, fragmented landscapes, unclear return and impact profiles, weak outcome data, insufficient aggregation platforms and limited graduation pathways from grants and technical assistance to concessional, blended or commercial capital.
• This points to a practical role for TNC and partners as convenors, evidence builders, pipeline aggregators and translators between conservation outcomes and the requirements of financiers.
• A practical implication is that grant funding for diagnostics, feasibility, community engagement, safeguards and monitoring should be treated as project readiness infrastructure rather than overhead; it is the layer that allows later concessional, corporate, public or impact capital to enter responsibly.
• TNC’s Nature for Water Facility and Resilient Watersheds Toolbox offer a practical reference point for this type of project preparation, combining science, finance, governance, technical assistance, implementation support and learning for watershed investment programmes, and applicability for the region should be explored.

5. Conservation-aligned investment needs patient, blended and catalytic capital

• The meeting surfaced a mismatch between conventional investor return expectations and the biological, social and economic realities of food and water systems.
• Some investors, particularly private equity and venture capital, expect returns in the 10–30% range.
• Participants questioned whether organic systems, regenerative transitions, replanting cycles and water resilience models can realistically deliver those returns within conventional fund timelines.
• Conservation-aligned investment is likely to require patient, blended and staged capital, including catalytic philanthropy, recoverable grants, technical assistance, first-loss capital, guarantees, concessional finance, programme-related investments and family-office or impact capital with longer time horizons.
• Project concepts will be more compelling where they show how different forms of capital can be sequenced over time, moving from grants and technical assistance to concessional finance, guarantees, corporate participation, public finance and impact investment as evidence and implementation readiness improve.
• TNC’s Nature Bonds programme also illustrates how conservation finance can be structured to unlock larger pools of capital for ecosystem protection, climate resilience and community benefit, with debt refinancing, science, planning and policy combined in a long-term finance model.

6. Outcomes, evidence and measurement will shape funder confidence

• Metrics and evidence emerged as decisive issues.
• Funders, DFIs and impact investors do not always use the language of “adaptation”; in some contexts, “resilience,” “business continuity,” “food security,” “risk reduction,” “inclusive growth” or “community resilience” may resonate more strongly.
• For agriculture, livelihoods were identified as a particularly important metric, including income improvement, income protection, insurance, resilience and alternative income pathways.
• The discussion highlighted the need to translate conservation and adaptation outcomes into decision-useful metrics that can support grantmaking, development-finance appraisal, impact measurement and financing models, not only retrospective reporting.
• This creates an opportunity for partners to co-develop evidence to support decision making, including metrics for farmer income stability, water security, avoided risk, biodiversity, community resilience, policy relevance and the additionality of catalytic capital.

7. Landscape and value-chain platforms are especially promising

• Participants discussed opportunities across palm oil landscapes in Sumatra and Kalimantan; rice systems in Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia; regenerative cocoa and coffee; shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam and Indonesia; and broader ASEAN food security priorities.
• The strongest opportunities were those where conservation outcomes can be linked to inclusive livelihoods, market demand, offtake arrangements, supply-chain resilience, farmer services, water quality and national or regional policy priorities.
• This reinforces the potential of landscape-oriented platforms that can host multiple forms of capital such as grants, technical assistance, concessional finance, corporate participation and impact investment around shared conservation and development outcomes.
• For potential partners, landscapes also offer a more coherent entry point than standalone grants or pilots because they can accommodate different mandates while maintaining a shared theory of change, governance approach, measurement framework and pathway to scale.
• TNC’s Asia Pacific portfolio provides useful reference points for this platform logic, including work in Indonesia to reduce forest conversion and improve sustainable land management; aquaculture efforts across Indonesia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands; and regional efforts to protect landscapes and seascapes at the scale ecological systems require.

8. Corporate and family-linked capital can complement philanthropy and development finance

The discussion pointed to a clear role for corporate and family-linked capital as complements to philanthropy, development finance and public finance.

• Examples such as Jollibee, Olam, Mars and other regional food companies illustrated how businesses with direct supply-chain exposure may support farmer training, regenerative practices, offtake and financing mechanisms.
• These investments become more compelling when grant funding, technical assistance or concessional capital helps reduce early-stage risk and strengthen business continuity and supply security.
• In this context, philanthropic and development finance actors can play a catalytic role by reducing early-stage risk, while corporate and family-linked capital can help anchor demand, offtake, producer incentives and longer-term continuity.
• Participants noted that companies, local and regional, are beginning to partner with multinational buyers, suggesting that regenerative and resilient food systems are moving beyond niche pilots. Offtake and market access are of utmost importance to the success of agricultural interventions.
• TNC’s aquaculture work in Asia Pacific is especially relevant to corporate- and market-linked capital, as it seeks to demonstrate how food production in marine and coastal environments can support economic opportunity while reducing ecological harm and protecting biodiversity.

9. Policy, public finance and development finance are enabling conditions

• Governments and public-finance institutions can reduce risk by sending clear policy signals, developing national strategies, aligning subsidies, providing guarantees or price support mechanisms and creating evidence-backed pathways for sustainable food and water systems.
• Participants cautioned that governments need confidence that regenerative or climate-resilient practices will not undermine food security, fiscal stability or farmer livelihoods. This reinforces the importance of credible evidence, demonstration landscapes, public-private-philanthropic partnerships and policy engagement as part of any investment strategy.
• Projects are likely to be more fundable where they can show alignment with public priorities while retaining enough independence and scientific credibility to build trust across communities, governments, donors and the private sector.

10. Safeguards matter for credibility, accountability and durability

• Participants raised the need to avoid maladaptation, greenwashing, impact-washing fragmented pilots and narrow financial structures that fail to account for ecological timeframes, community realities and accountability to intended beneficiaries. Smallholder security must come first.
• Biodiversity, carbon and water outcomes are more likely to be durable when they reinforce farmer livelihoods, resilience and market access rather than being framed as external conservation objectives.
• This reinforces the importance of partners who can hold together ecological integrity, community benefit, fiduciary discipline and impact accountability across the full life of a landscape programme.

11. Strategic implication for TNC

• Asia Pacific Provide can add value not merely by identifying conservation priorities, but by helping to make the right priorities financeable, fundable, scalable and credible to partners with different mandates.
• This could include convening philanthropies, DFIs, public agencies, corporates and impact investors around specific landscapes and value chains; translating conservation outcomes into investment-ready and grant-making-relevant metrics; building regional evidence on what works; supporting aggregation of small projects; shaping blended-finance structures; and helping capital move from demonstration to scale.
• For partners seeking credible, locally grounded and regionally relevant food and water systems work, TNC’s comparative advantage may lie in stitching together science, landscapes, communities, policy, philanthropy, development finance and impact capital in ways that few actors are positioned to do alone.
• These TNC precedents give potential partners something concrete to build from: tested approaches in watershed investment, conservation finance, aquaculture, landscape protection, science-based planning and community-linked implementation that can be adapted to Asia Pacific food and water systems.

Conclusion

Why landscape-oriented work is the right next step

• Asia Pacific does not need another narrow pipeline of isolated projects; it needs landscape-oriented platforms that connect food security, water security, farmer livelihoods, biodiversity, climate resilience and capital that is patient enough to value public goods and long-term systems change.
• Conservation-led approaches are well suited to this task because they work with the ecological systems that underpin food and water security, rather than treating nature as an externality to be engineered around or a co-benefit to be measured after the fact.
• Healthy watersheds regulate flows and improve water quality; mangroves, wetlands, reefs, floodplains and forests buffer floods and storms; and regenerative agricultural landscapes strengthen soils, reduce input dependency and improve resilience over time.
• For philanthropic, development and impact finance actors, these are not peripheral co-benefits. They are the operating systems of durable food and water security and therefore core to risk reduction, resilience and long-term development outcomes.

Why not default to grey infrastructure or technology-led solutions alone

• This is not an argument for abandoning grey infrastructure or technology.
• Conventional infrastructure can be essential, especially in dense urban areas or where precise engineered protection is required.
• However, grey infrastructure is often designed to solve a single problem, can lock in high capital and maintenance costs and may transfer risk elsewhere if ecological dynamics and community impacts are ignored.
• Technology-led solutions can improve monitoring, efficiency and market access, but technology alone rarely repairs degraded soils, reconnects floodplains, restores mangroves, rebuilds trust with smallholders or aligns incentives across a value chain.
• Conservation-led approaches, particularly when combined with targeted grey and digital tools, can deliver infrastructure services while also generating biodiversity, livelihood, carbon, water-quality and resilience benefits that single-purpose assets struggle to capture and that mission-driven capital is well placed to value.