Regenerative agriculture is emerging as a significant, financially profitable investment opportunity
27 June, 2025 - One of the greatest challenges that societies around the world face is how to meet the growing demand for food without harming the ecosystem services upon which agricultural production depends.
Agriculture is the bedrock of global food and economic security, providing jobs, livelihoods and sustenance for billions of people around the world. Yet our agriculture and food systems are also a major driver of environmental harm – responsible for around 90% of tropical deforestation, a third of global emissions, and the main driver of biodiversity loss. At the same time, they are also highly vulnerable to climate impacts and input shocks, compounding risks for farmers, businesses and investors, and undermining the resilience of food systems.
Regenerative agriculture is rapidly rising up the global agenda as a promising, pro-farmer solution, one which offers potential to deliver attractive investment returns, higher and more stable farmer income, greater food and water security, more local jobs, greater biodiversity and reduced carbon emissions. This is part of a wider transition to a new, more productive agricultural and land use system that regenerates natural capital rather than depleting it.
While terminology varies – from regenerative, agroecological, organic, and other sustainable or nature-positive models – the unifying aim is a transition towards food production systems that deliver measurable outcomes across soil health, water use, biodiversity, climate resilience and farmer livelihoods.
Farmers around the world are demonstrating that this transition is not only possible – but profitable. In fact, regenerative systems are proving to be more resilient, especially in the face of extreme weather and supply chain volatility. With the right policy and market incentives, tailored to local conditions, regenerative agriculture offers a scalable way to feed the world reliably while reducing risk and rebuilding natural capital on which productivity depends. An example is procurement of nutritious school meals, in which investors and other philanthropies are providing upfront capital for regenerative agriculture transitions from local farmers and production to support supply chains connected to school meal programs. The Rockefeller Foundation’s recent $100m commitment aims to serve 100m children nutritious school meals over the next five years in more than a dozen countries.
Nigel Topping, Co-Founder Ambition Loop and High-Level Climate Champion for COP26:
We urgently need to scale finance to drive the transition to regenerative agriculture. We see an exponentially growing pipeline of investable opportunities in our collaborative initiative, the Earth Investment Engine. And new catalytic funds are forming – the crucial risk-sharing capital that makes commercial capital economic and unlocks capital at scale. This is the recipe for a successful land transition – exponential opportunities plus innovative catalytic approaches.
Finance is flowing to a growing pipeline of opportunities
Markets like Brazil are moving quickly, with more than $3.6 billion of publicly reported nature-based investments recorded since August 2022, over 40% of which was in the last nine months alone. And the pipeline of investment-ready opportunities is also growing. The Capital for Climate pipeline mapping identifies 21 development platforms with projected capital needs growing from $3.1B to $5.5B by 2027, spanning regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, reforestation, and land restoration in Brazil.
And ecosystem partners are helping de-risk, aggregate and connect
There is now a growing number of solution providers offering the connective tissue between investors and regenerative agriculture opportunity owners. The Earth Investment Engine – a collaborative initiative of Ambition Loop, Capital for Climate and the Climate Champions’ Regional Platform for Climate Projects – is working with over 15 local and global actors to aggregate pipelines, present opportunities with consistent data, and address policy blocks to capital mobilization. This initiative has identified more than $7.7 billion in regenerative agriculture opportunities that are ready for investment.
Catalytic Funds are de-risking early-stage investment, offering patient capital, flexible capital structures, technical assistance and other locally-appropriate support to unlock financing for farmers transitioning to regenerative practices. The Innovative Finance for the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco (IFACC) initiative has now reached nearly $500 million disbursed, with a goal of mobilizing $10 billion by the end of the decade. The Catalytic Capital for the Agricultural Transition (CCAT) fund is crowding in private finance to unlock better terms for farmers, offering low-interest capital to incentivize the recovery of already-cleared land rather than further deforestation. DiversiFund, the Brazil EcoInvest Fund, the Stafford International Timberland Fund and the Kuali Fund are other examples of early movers building on real world learning, capturing opportunities and shaping the market.
Insurance is another important mechanism helping to increase the supply and decrease the cost of the transition finance required. Solutions derisk returns by mitigating weather, fire, political and credit risks during the transition and increase the integrity and value of associated carbon credits too.
New models are emerging that take a broader view of value, including soil health, resilience and biodiversity. Some pilots are testing insurance at the landscape level, bundling risk across diversified farms to lower costs and increase uptake. These innovations are especially important for smallholders and mid-sized producers, where conventional crop insurance is often unavailable or unaffordable.
Allocating value to ecosystem restoration – including carbon markets and the nascent biodiversity credits – can also provide additional revenue to support the transition to regenerative agriculture, strengthening the investment case. The Economy of Love initiative in Egypt supports farmers through community-based benefit-sharing. In Andhra Pradesh, a government-backed natural farming programme has grown from 40,000 to over a million farmers and is helping shape new models for carbon-linked investment. Under current policy and market conditions, price volatility remains an issue, so other incentives remain important.
Country and landscape-level platforms are helping to coordinate public and private actors, align priorities, build capacity and attract capital. The Brazilian Investment Platform – a wider initiative that is also surfacing regenerative agriculture opportunities – is an example of this. RAFT aims to increase philanthropic and investor collaboration to accelerate and scale the transition to regenerative and agroecological food, focussing on Brazil, Europe, India, Kenya, Midwest USA and Tanzania.
Closing the financing gap
The estimated annual financing gap for regenerative agriculture is between $200-$450 billion. Closing it will require tailored financial structures, improved data, and collaborative partnerships at the global, country and local level. Investors need more reliable data on risk, performance and outcomes. Local institutions need support to build capacity and structure investment-ready projects. Stronger offtake agreements, standardised metrics and enabling policy environments are all part of the solution.
The thriving companies and investors of tomorrow will be those who move early to align their business models, address commodity-driven deforestation, and help accelerate the land use and food systems transition – developing and tapping solutions that could generate up to USD$4.5 trillion of new business opportunities annually by 2030.
We are already seeing many of the world’s largest food and agriculture companies move in this direction, incorporating regenerative agriculture as a key element of their business strategy. Nestlé is working with its suppliers and farmers to support adoption of regenerative agriculture, having already reached its goal of 20% of key ingredients sourced regeneratively by 2025, it is now working towards 50% by 2030. Danone and Unilever are also making significant commitments and investments across their supply chains.
Solutions centred on people and the communities they live in are essential. Collaborative initiatives that help connect farmers, cooperatives, community leaders, technical experts, businesses and investors are key to unlocking the transition to regenerative. Examples such as Belterra in Brazil show that with the right support, small and medium-sized farms can connect with commercial partners to create new markets and customers for their crops, ensuring sustainability and profitability go hand in hand.
As the United Nations Food Systems Summit +4 Stocktake approaches and Brazil prepares to host COP30, the role of regenerative agriculture in delivering food security, climate resilience and economic prosperity is coming into sharper focus. The COP30 Action Agenda, published last week by the COP30 Presidency to rally countries and non-State actors around effective implementation of the Global Stocktake, puts sustainable agriculture and resilient food systems at the heart of the climate agenda in 2025 and beyond.
This work aligns directly with the High-Level Climate Champions’ Food Systems Call to Action, launched at COP28 and supported by hundreds of non-State actors. As that initiative makes clear, transforming food systems is essential for climate resilience, biodiversity protection and global food security. Regenerative agriculture is a core part of this agenda, offering a viable, scalable approach to delivering the economic and social transition necessary to achieve the Paris Agreement, Sharm El Sheikh Adaptation Agenda and the 2030 Breakthroughs.
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This article is based on work by Brunswick Group, Ambition Loop, the Climate Champions Team and other partners working on catalysing finance for sustainable agriculture and nature-based solutions.