Financing Restoration: How Ecosystem Investment Partners Turns Environmental Law into Real Assets

This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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In episode 93 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I sit down with Nick Dilks, Co Founder and Managing Partner of Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), a firm that has quietly become one of the most important players in large scale ecological restoration in the United States.

Nick grew up splitting time between Philadelphia and a family farm on the Chesapeake Bay. That early exposure to land and water shaped a life long focus on conservation. After a decade at The Conservation Fund structuring complex land deals, he co founded EIP in 2006 to answer a simple but difficult question.

Can you use private capital, at scale, to restore degraded ecosystems while still meeting the financial expectations of institutional investors

Over almost twenty years, EIP has shown that the answer is yes.

The firm acquires degraded land, restores wetlands, streams, and habitats, then sells mitigation credits to public and private developers that are required by law to offset their environmental impacts. It is a space where environmental protection, infrastructure, housing, and finance all intersect.

In this conversation, Nick explains how mitigation banking actually works, why these markets are fully regulated and compulsory, how a new 400 million dollar fund will expand EIP’s work, and why he believes more young people should bring serious financial skills into the environmental sector.

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