Mapping the Conservation Finance Landscape in Missouri: The Gap Between Ambition and Capital
Conservation outcomes in Missouri, and everywhere, depend on financial systems that don't yet exist at the scale needed. Landowners, entrepreneurs, and communities working to restore ecosystems often lack access to patient, tailored capital.
At the same time, many of the public and private beneficiaries of healthy land and water (e.g., corporate supply chains, utilities, downstream communities) remain outside the funding equation. Closing that gap requires a clearer picture of where dollars currently flow, where they don't, and which interventions can unlock new sources of private and philanthropic investment alongside public funding.
With the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC), New Leaf Climate will map the current state of conservation finance in Missouri and identify where it falls short. The work spans desk research and stakeholder engagement to assess the status, gaps, needs, and opportunities for financing conservation across the state's key ecosystem value chains: forests, farming, grasslands, rivers, and the cross-cutting areas of outdoor recreation, land protection, nature-based infrastructure, and community conservation.
Building a Complete View of Conservation Finance in the Show Me State
Our work will incorporate market research, stakeholder interviews and site visits to produce:
Actionable recommendations. Specific entry points MDC and its partners can use to strengthen existing funding mechanisms, unlock new sources of capital, and coordinate across public and private actors.
Stakeholder database. A structured record of the practitioners, funders, agencies, and organizations engaged through the project – built to support ongoing relationship-building and collaboration.
Summary report. A comprehensive assessment of conservation finance in Missouri, covering the physical landscape, current funding flows, ecosystem value chains (forests, farming, grasslands, rivers, and cross-cutting areas), and a nature economy analysis.
How We Approach This Work
New Leafs brings place-based approaches and frameworks that go beyond conventional conservation research:
One Health framing. We treat human, wildlife, and ecosystem health as interconnected, expanding the relevance and the funder base of conservation work.
Landscape and community scale. We design for cross-boundary collaboration, where collective action produces benefits individual projects can't deliver alone.
Whole value chain partnerships. We connect the input providers, implementers, and outcome markets that need to move together to break the "you go first" bottleneck holding conservation finance back.
Public-private collaboration. We help agencies and private actors find the shared infrastructure, services, and funding structures that benefit both in order to draw more of the institutions that gain from conservation into supporting it.
Interested in learning more or contributing to our research? Email megan@newleafclimate.com.
