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Banking on Nature

���Ĵ�ýs and researchers from the Nicholas School of the Environment are working at the intersection of ecology, policy and finance to support nature-based solutions to social and environmental problems.

Text by Julie Leibach/Video by Alina Taalman 

as a farm kid growing up in northeastern North Carolina, Wilbert Bryant made a decision: One day he would leave his rural community and never return.

He followed through on the first promise, serving for more than two decades in the U.S. Army, with domestic and overseas assignments. But the N.C. countryside lured him back. Bryant now owns a mix of agricultural fields and woodland in Halifax and Martin counties.

“I just feel naturally it’s in my blood,” Bryant says of his connection to the land. “It came full circle.” 

With two grown daughters of his own, Bryant is committed to stewarding his property for future generations. “That’s my ultimate goal — to utilize the land, but leave it in a better condition than what I walked into,” he says.

For ideas on managing his wooded acreage, Bryant has partnered with a group of forestry students from ���Ĵ�ý’s Nicholas School of the Environment. The collaboration is part of the students’ Capstone Project, a required course within the Master of Forestry program. 

The course pairs student teams with small North Carolina landowners to assess their forested property and to understand the owners’ financial and environmental priorities. Using that information, the students write a forest management plan for their assigned partners. 

A forest management plan includes relevant property details, such as tree species and soil type, and provides a road map for achieving a landowner’s goals. For example, the owner may wish to harvest timber on one part of the property while preserving important wildlife habitat on another.

Bryant already has a forest management plan devised by a professional forester, but the Duke students could provide a “set of fresh eyes,” he says. “They may tap into some things that I may never even thought of.”

At the time of publication, the students were crunching data and analyzing site specifics on woodland that Bryant owns in Martin County. The 85-acre parcel consists primarily of loblolly pine, a popular timber species. 

“We’re starting to run the financials, doing research on what endangered species could be there…Is that going to be an issue if we recommend a [timber] harvest at some point?” says team member Annabel Weyhrich.

For Weyhrich, the Capstone Project complements other coursework designed by the Nicholas School’s , or NRFI (pronounced “nur-fee”). 

Established in 2018, NRFI brings together students, scholars and industry professionals to learn how innovative financing can improve how stakeholders manage, conserve and restore forests and other critical natural resources. 

The program’s interdisciplinary curriculum includes classes in the hard sciences, business and policy so that students “understand not only how natural resources work, but also they understand the risk and returns associated with investing in nature,” says NRFI director Bin “Richard” Mei.                                                                                        

Mei and colleagues are building on the Nicholas School’s research and curriculum on nature-based solutions — efforts to harness nature to address social and environmental challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and flooding. 

Historically, such projects have largely relied on federal grants and other public funding. But these traditional sources are limited or shrinking, according to a recent by Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. 

To succeed, nature-based projects increasingly require a strategic blend of public and private dollars. 

At the Nicholas School, “it’s not: How do we make money off the environment. It’s: How do we bring money to the environment,” says Martin Doyle, a professor of river systems science and policy and a NRFI faculty member. “Sometimes the private dollars are the driver. Sometimes the private dollars are that last 10% that you need to get one of these projects off the ground.”  

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

The NRFI curriculum has provided essential training for Weyhrich, who plans to pursue a career in timberland investing, a financial strategy that treats trees as an asset. 

“My five-year plan is to be a portfolio manager for a TIMO [timber investment management organization], so that means I would have clients where I manage their investments that are specifically in forestland,” explains Weyhrich, who is slated to graduate in the spring with a Master of Environmental Management degree from the Nicholas School and a Master of Business Administration degree from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

Since the 1980s, institutional investors, such as pension funds and universities, have been diversifying their portfolios with assets of the woody variety. The rationale is that trees increase in value as they grow and provide relatively predictable returns on their sale down the road, even during economic turmoil.

More recently, however, forests have drawn financial interest in assets beyond lumber. 

“Nowadays, we’ve seen an increasing trend in investments in forest-based ecosystem services like carbon credits, biodiversity credits or recreational uses,” Mei says. 

In this video, Duke experts describe how innovative financing can support nature-based solutions. 

Carbon and biodiversity credits are essentially certificates that businesses can purchase to counterbalance carbon emissions or environmental disturbances, respectively. In the case of carbon, a credit represents a specific amount of carbon removed from or diverted from release into the air, either by a technological system or by the natural environment. 

As a simple example, say an artificial intelligence company is building a data center. To offset its carbon emissions, the company could purchase carbon credits from the marketplace. 

Now, say that a landowner like Wilbert Bryant wants to make some money off his forested property. He could choose to sell the wood for timber. Alternatively, he could elect to keep the trees — along with the carbon they store — and sell carbon credits instead.

Once his credits sell, Bryant would receive compensation. Meanwhile, the A.I. company that bought the credits could immediately use them all, or save a portion to use or resell later.

Whereas carbon credits have been available for decades, biodiversity credits are an emerging area of nature finance. “Measuring biodiversity credits is more challenging than measuring carbon credits because carbon is a single, uniform commodity, while biodiversity is complex and localized,” Mei says. 

Several NRFI students are conducting research on biodiversity credits using as their lab. 

“We want to publish a regional biodiversity index, something like the S&P 500, which is measurable and investable,” says Mei, referring to the stock index that tracks the performance of leading publicly traded companies in the United States.

“Not every single landowner is timber profit-driven,” he adds, so selling carbon or biodiversity credits could be an attractive alternative for property owners looking for other ways to earn returns on their land.

For Peat’s Sake

Ecosystems beyond forests can provide carbon credits, too. Nicholas School researchers have been studying another promising source: pocosins — rain-fed wetlands commonly known as bogs.

Along the Atlantic coastal plain from Virginia to northern Florida, these waterlogged landscapes consist of pines, cedars and evergreen shrubs that support an array of wildlife, including eastern black bears, endangered and myriad waterfowl species. 

But their most distinctive feature — at least to an ecologist studying carbon cycling — is their soil, called peat, which can extend 15 feet below ground. Most of that peat consists of dead plants, whereas other soil types are predominantly mineral in makeup. 

Because peat is 95% organic matter, it packs far more carbon than other soils. And undisturbed peatlands hang on to that carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. 

Given that peatlands cover only 3-4% of land on earth, they “fight way above their weight,” in terms of carbon storage, says Curtis Richardson, the John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Resource Ecology at the Nicholas School who’s been pocosin ecology and carbon cycling for 40-some years.

Pocosins are particularly good at locking in carbon. by Richardson and colleagues has shown that shrub-based peat in pocosins is slower to decompose than peat from bogs in northern regions dominated by black spruce and sphagnum moss.

“Peat [in pocosins] is very recalcitrant,” Richardson says. “The plants that grow there produce a lot of strange chemicals — aromatics and phenolics — and the microbes simply can’t break these down. They’re basically antimicrobial chemicals.” 

However, more than 70% of pocosin peatland along the southeastern coastal plain has been altered through farming, forestry and other activities, Richardson’s team . Sans water, pocosins and other peatlands lose their storage capacity, exhaling massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Globally, drained and degraded peatlands are responsible for about 4% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to a by the United Nations Environment Programme. That number excludes carbon released when peatlands burn. 

Parched peatlands are tinderboxes. For example, a 2008 in North Carolina that burned nearly 42,000 acres — mostly pocosin — more than 34 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That amount roughly equals the annual emissions from .

Through the Nicholas School’s , Richardson, senior research scientist Neal Flanagan and colleagues have been exploring the possibility of rewetting drained pocosins to sequester carbon and restore ecosystem health. 

Their test site is a in northeastern coastal North Carolina that was drained decades ago for agriculture. For the past several years, the team has been exploring how raising the water table through a system of weirs, or dam-like structures, could restore the ecosystem while achieving optimal carbon sequestration. 

The project draws on research conducted by Richardson and team at , the site of one of the country’s largest wetland restoration projects. 

In 2024, the Wetland and Coasts Center partnered with a company called Pantheon Regeneration PBC to explore how their test site, called , could support the sale of carbon credits. 

Pantheon Regeneration is a nature-based solutions company that develops projects designed to remove carbon from the atmosphere, bolster biodiversity and build resilience to natural and climate hazards. 

“They are a group that I think has their heart in the right place. They do want to sell carbon credits, but they basically want to use the profits off PER1 to buy other drained peatlands and basically scale this up nationwide,” Richardson says. “They are doing the whole financial part of it, with partners like Microsoft, and my team is doing the scientific validation of carbon credits.”

The pilot pocosin restoration project could potentially generate millions of credits over its 20-year life cycle, Richardson says, though he would consider the endeavor a win regardless of the number. 

“As an ecologist, whether they sold any credits or not, I’d be thrilled” by the restoration, he says. 

To support future opportunities for pocosin rewetting, researchers at the Nicholas Institute are developing of drainage ditches in North Carolina. These areas could signify areas where pocosins were artificially drained for other activities.

“There’s been a lot of restoration already in peatlands in North Carolina, especially in the national wildlife refuges, but there’s still opportunities out there. They’re just getting a little harder to find and know about,” says Katie Warnell, a senior policy researcher at the Nicholas Institute who earned a Master of Environmental Management degree and a Geospatial Analysis Certificate from the Nicholas School.

“The type of comprehensive ditch map that we’re putting together hopefully will be really helpful in identifying new opportunities” for pocosin restoration, she says.

Streams of Revenue

In 2002, a group of state and federal agencies that the Milburnie Dam straddling North Carolina’s Neuse River should be prioritized for removal. In 2017, earth-moving machines finally , enabling the river near Raleigh to flow naturally again.

The dam removal project was the first of its kind to qualify as a stream mitigation bank, a financial mechanism similar in concept to carbon credits. Through stream mitigation banking, a company restores a stream in one area, then sells credits to companies or agencies that are required to offset damage to a stream elsewhere, according to regulations under the Clean Water Act. 

With the dam now gone, “shad are able to migrate from the ocean all the way up to Raleigh,” says river scientist Doyle, who collaborated with regulatory agencies and other stakeholders on the project. “It’s pretty cool to have played a very small part in this kind of broader-scale watershed ecosystem restoration.” 

Doyle, who also directs the at the Nicholas Institute, has dedicated much of his career to studying how environmental regulations shape financial investment in wetland restoration. 

“Really getting to know the mitigation bankers, really getting to know the investors, and really getting into the deep, totally dorky policy” is essential to understanding why certain restoration projects unfold as they do — and where improvements can be made, Doyle says.

For example, in their book, , Doyle and coauthor Rebecca Lave, of Indiana University, compare N.C. streams restored for mitigation banking with streams restored through other funding mechanisms. 

They explain that mitigated streams often appear unnaturally snake-like — an outcome stemming from an amalgam of economic, regulatory and cultural influences.  

“What we see across certain geographies of the United States is just mile after mile of these really peculiar little streams. So that’s one effect that regulatory markets can have, if we’re not thoughtful and intentional about how we create those regulations in the first place,” Doyle says. “The question, then, is whether these homogenous, sinusoidal streams are as ecologically beneficial as a stream that is more random and ‘messy.’” 

As private dollars become more important to nature-based projects, Doyle challenges his students to explore how different sources of capital can be mixed and matched to support different types of stream restoration projects.

“The ideal for me is that 20 years from now, one of my former students has innovated entirely new ways to bring new types of capital to environmental restoration,” Doyle says, and “they have a broad toolbox of finance, and policy, and science to deploy when new environmental challenges emerge.” 

Returns on Investment

For their Capstone Project, Weyhrich and her teammates first visited Bryant’s woodland with a consulting forester who partners with NRFI to help train students.   

“We got to walk around the property with him, thinking about what he thinks about, what he’s noticing,” Weyhrich explains. 

During their next foray, however, the students were on their own to measure tree size, height and age on about 10 different plots. “The first one took us two and a half hours, and then by the end of it, we got that down to about an hour,” Weyhrich says.  

Later this fall, the students will present their findings to their professors and to Bryant, who plans to attend in person. 

For his part, Bryant sees the Capstone Project as mutually beneficial: He receives input on land management, and the students get to apply their skills. 

After all, says Bryant, there’s no substitute for getting out into the field — or the forest, so to speak. “That’s where, to me, the real learning comes in.” 

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This article was written by Julie Leibach and first published by ���Ĵ�ý’s Nicholas School of the Environment on Oct. 19, 2026. 

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