An estimated 15 billion trees are cut down each year — more than 41 million per day. Given this pace of land degradation, it is hard to imagine how traditional reforestation methods, which rely on hand-planting live seedlings, could ever keep up. BioCarbon Engineering offers another way: a specialized drone, no more than two feet in height, that has the potential to plant 400,000 seeds per day, which is 150 times faster than a pair of human hands.

BioCarbon’s mission is to counteract land degradation by reforesting landscapes at an industrial scale and restoring lands at a rapid pace, firing pods containing nutrients and seeds into the ground. The company is currently working on projects in Australia, Canada, Myanmar and the United Kingdom.

Biocarbon Engineering is one of many companies that make up the expanding restoration economy, businesses that have landscape restoration at the core of their customer value propositions. The World Resources Institute and The Nature Conservancy analyzed more than 140 companies in this space to understand how they are making money from restoring land. Among these, 14 companies whose median sales growth reached 100 percent in 2017, are showcased in a new report titled The Business of Planting Trees: A Growing Investment Opportunity (https://bit.ly/2n4cp7F).

Although these companies represent only a small subset of the broader sector, they showcase the diversity of business opportunities. Among them:

Guayaki reinvented the traditional Argentinian “yerba mate” drink for the U.S. market in the form of ready-to-drink teas and energy drinks. Because yerba mate is best grown in the shade, the company partners with small farmers and indigenous communities in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to regenerate the Atlantic rainforest and grow yerba mate under the rainforest canopy. With this market-driven restoration approach, Guayaki reached $60 million in sales in 2017.

EcoPlanet Bamboo aims to alleviate the pressure on natural forests by developing sustainable bamboo as an alternative timber and fiber source for major industrial markets, including for toilet and tissue paper, renewable packaging materials for the food and beverage industry, and construction and housing materials.

New Forests is a timber investment management organization whose investment strategies include ecosystem restoration in the United States, as well as sustainable forestry in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. New Forests manages $3 billion in timberland assets, with 39 percent of the area managed for conservation outcomes and the remainder used for sustainable timber production.

Companies around the world are rising to meet the need to restore degraded land. These enterprises have the potential to deliver profit and impact at scale, contributing to a flourishing restoration economy while also making money for investors. At this critical time when stock and bond markets are at rich valuations and investors are looking for the next growth opportunity, the world’s oldest and most efficient carbon-capture technology is waiting: trees.

Excerpted from an article written by Eriks Brolis, Sofia Faruqi, Andrés Anchondo Ortega and Andrew Wu for the World Resources Institute. The complete article is at: https://bit.ly/2n66ujp.