Thank you for sharing your book here!

I just browsed it enough to know that I want to sit down for it. Hopefully later this week.

Hey Vance, thanks for sharing, this looks very interesting! I would love to see a one paragraph blurb that is your elevator pitch for the book and the "new model". I scanned the Forward and the Intro and still can't say what the "new model" is.  Apologies if I just missed it!

This is an interesting read, Vance!

Perhaps first a disclaimer. Reading this book was my first serious dive/read/exploration of the topic of nature conservation finance.

One of the most enlightening parts is the circular diagram of the environmental impact bond ( fig. 1.1 in chapter 1 ) because it shows all the typical roles involved, their relations, and the flow of money/value.

For me the eye opener was that there can be many parties involved, which is completely different from the basic grant making model where there are only two parties. This makes the organization of such an instrument quite complicated, and the book mentions, more than once I believe, that this requires the capacity to do so.

The diagram gave me one question, which I could not find answered in the book. As I understand it, the party that receives/consumes the investment ( the service provider ) is not the same as the payor. The payor pays the investors when the actions of the service provider reach a certain measurable threshold of effect ( like an amount of drinking water delivered ). But what happens when that effect is not reached? Will the investor simply loose their money, or will someone else repay their investment?

I found the case studies very illustrative of how such finance instruments can be used for fire protection, water supply, waste water processing and storm flood protection. It should be noticed however, that the cases all take place in California, or the West coast area of the USA and that the payors are governmental agencies or at least organizations working for public service deliveries, which means that in the end tax payers or public service users ( to stay with the drinking water example, the public that pays their water bills ) pay the investment. These two factors mean that there is a reasonable supply of money to the payor to repay the debt and thus a relatively low risk to the investors. Right?

If I got this more or less right then to me the value of the book is that it shows how conservation finance can work in an economically developed country for conservation causes that have a clear and direct impact on the citizens.