The Natural Infrastructure Investment Consortium (NIIC) is a multi-stakeholder initiative supporting a cohort of leading small-to-mid sized cities in demonstrating strategies to significantly scale up the investment and delivery of natural infrastructure strategies addressing three specific climate risk cases—wildfire, flooding, and extreme heat. The NIIC draws on nearly ten years of capacity building work with cities across the Americas and in Europe to identify the critical areas of local governance, community capacity, and financial systems and capital structures needed to deliver and maintain natural infrastructure solutions at scale.

The project grows out of work conducted by Center for Regenerative Solutions, Trust for Public Land and a network of other NGOs and civic support organizations like the International City Managers Association (ICMA) that has developed, tested and proven methods for expanding local capacity and capital formation systems that enable local governments and their critical community-based civic partners in accessing and deploying a range of different types of capital towards community infrastructure projects. This is the first time these systems have been oriented specifically towards expanding the development, deployment and ongoing maintenance of natural infrastructure systems—urban forestry, green stormwater infrastructure, urban biodiversity management, fire resilient landscape design—at scales sufficient to achieve significant reductions in risks from wildfire, extreme heat or flooding.

Through these efforts, a cohort of cities doing leading edge work in these core risk areas has emerged. Discussions are now underway with a network of close to 20 such cities interested in participating in this cohort initiative.

Each participating city is expected to advance $20M–$50M in natural-infrastructure-anchored resilience project activity over three years, supported by a coordinated bench of capacity-building partners and a dedicated capital structure. A $10M investment in the social, governance and financial infrastructure capacity building with the selected communities over three years in the capacity building needed to unlock $300M+ in project activity across the cohort.

Learn more by downloading the Detailed Brief below!