When it comes to climate-related investments, the lion’s share has gone to companies working in energy and transportation. Most investors overlook actual lions — that is, nature-based solutions like biodiversity tend to get short shrift in the investment world. Just $35 billion was invested in nature-based solutions in 2022, compared with $1.46 trillion for the rest of the climate finance sector.
To address the shortfall, Just Climate has raised $175 million from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and CalSTRS.
Just Climate is an offshoot of Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management. Until this year, it had focused on what it calls industrial climate solutions, much like most other private climate tech investors.
The new fund will focus on natural climate solutions, which could include everything from farming to forestry. Nature-based solutions address greenhouse gas sources that typically fall under agriculture, forestry, and land-use change, which together represent about 15% of annual global emissions.
But nature-based solutions can also eliminate carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere. Reforestation projects grow new trees on degraded land, sequestering carbon in the wood. For example, Microsoft recently invested in one such startup, Chestnut Carbon.
The new fund aims to restore nature to reverse biodiversity loss and emissions from land use. The firm cites a few examples of possible investments, including biological fertilizers and pesticides, restoration finance platforms, and technologies that verify carbon reduction and biodiversity protection.
Just Climate’s first investment, made in January, led a Series B funding round in NatureMetrics. The company determines the biodiversity of a site by surveying what’s known as eDNA, or environmental DNA, which is free-floating DNA found in water or soil samples.