What is the goal of the Water and Nature Fund?

As a component of the foundation’s Environment Program, the Water and Nature Fund’s investments will align with and advance its goals. These include:

• Protecting and restoring wetlands to reduce flood risks and improve water quality.
• Improving forest management in headwaters to support healthy rivers, wetlands and forests.
• Protecting and restoring critical coastal habitats, including reefs, coastal wetlands, seagrasses and mangroves.
• Improving fisheries management for healthier, more economically resilient fisheries. 
• Improving agricultural management by working with farmers to conserve and improve water quality.   

Our investments will work alongside our grants and focus on expanding the scope and scale of nature-based solutions by targeting novel and emerging models and strategies overlooked by traditional investors. By making charitable investments in higher-risk, high-impact strategies that prioritize impact over financial returns, we can help fuel innovative, scalable solutions to elevate nature and create a more resilient future.

How does the Water and Nature Fund work with the Walton Family Foundation’s traditional grantmaking?

Both traditional grants and impact investments are critical tools to advance solutions that will help reduce the impacts of climate change on rivers, oceans and communities. Investments from the Water and Nature Fund will align with the goals and strategies of the foundation’s Environment Program and are designed to complement our grantmaking. These impact investments provide benefits that go beyond what grants can do, including:

• Providing early capital for innovative, higher-risk strategies that can demonstrate the impact and viability of investing in nature-based solutions. This helps attract more traditional investors to unlock funding that would not otherwise exist to increase the size and scope of projects.
• Increasing the number of projects we can support by recycling any financial returns from investments into new nature-based projects. 

How do you decide what projects to invest in?

We fund high-impact, nature-based projects that may be overlooked or seen as too risky for traditional investors. When evaluating what to invest in, we are focused on a project's ability to provide innovative solutions that expand the scope and impact of nature-based solutions while unlocking future sources of capital for the sector.

• Each investment will be assessed for its ability to expand the impact of the foundation’s Environment Program. Projects should be able to drive impacts that would not be possible through grants alone. 

• Investments focus on providing early capital for innovative, unproven strategies to help reduce risk and attract additional capital from diverse sources.

• Investments should fuel systems-level change rather than narrower, one-off impacts that treat symptoms instead of addressing structural root causes.
  
• Investments focus on financing unproven or emerging models, financial mechanisms and solutions. 

• The fund focuses on projects that have the ability to deliver widespread impact. This could include the size and scope of the direct intervention, as well as the ability of the intervention to attract additional capital, be replicated, or influence other industries.